Agreement; I can’t remember off-hand what my GTX1050 ti ran me back in 2017, but I was gobsmacked to see that it’s still in the ~$250 range, and it also warms up the room considerably, especially if I’m pushing hard on it and the CPU (i7-6700) at the same time.
Nice during the winter, not so much in the summertime.
Might have been a BTX form factor, but TBH with HP/Compaq it’s always been something ‘not quite’ industry standard for the innards of their machines. (Dell is not immune to this, either; I have a couple shelves of Optiplex GX280 ‘clamshell’ boxes and 520s ‘bricks’ from the P4 era in storage, and mainboard and PSU are utterly not standardized to anything but those models. the Precision workstation that used to be my daily driver? same deal; standardized parts for drives, memory, fans, but the mainboard and PSU are very much unique to that model line.
When I do finally go to replace the desktop, it’s most likely going to end up in a rackmount capable case; or a small NAS and a mid-range laptop with a docking station.
