
First piece of the computer acquired via ebay

...from an obviously ignorant seller. I'm not sure how it looked when it was originally packed, but I'm guessing it was around the middle judging from the dings in the box cardboard.

No padding or wrapping means that it got jostled quite a bit,and the PCI bracket got bent in shipment.

It was clearly not bent in the auction photos, so this definitely counts as shipping damage.

Either way, here's the card. It's a highly exclusive, twin Kepler architecture GTX 690. This thing is very important in terms of Nvidia's history, as it was its last mainstream dual-GPU card (Titan Z I believe also was), and it is the birth of the now-standard aluminum shelled vapor chamber heatsinked Nvidia Reference Cooler.

Here it is next to the MSI GTX 750ti that was used in this build.

I think this particular 690 was from an Alienware prebuild, which is why it has that bracket on the rear. I needed to remove it in order to fit the card in the uATX blast from the past case and test it out to see if being shipped without protection killed it.

Rear plate removed.

Took awhile, but I managed to fit it into the case.

Slight problem though, there was a bracket on the case that contacted the card in the rear.

Keeping the GTX 690 from shorting on the support by using a crappy Magic card lol.
I hooked it up to a Seasonic X-650 power supply, and it runs fine (surprisingly). I ran the Monster Hunter Online benchmark tool, and it scored a 95th percentile. The 2+2GB VRAM configuration is kind of limiting, but I'm hoping that it'll be okay for limited game playing. For some reason Overwatch on my GTX 980ti uses up around 1.5GB at 1440p, while running the basic MHO benchmark at 720p on a 1440x900 display it uses up just over 2000MB. I wonder why that's the case?
Speaking of cases, I suppose that's next on the list. I was actually looking for a now out-of-production Corsair 380t but they are extremely hard to find at $250+ these days...
CPU+mobo I'm looking at the new Kaby Lake i3-7350K. It's the first overclockable Core i3, and allegely hits 5.0GHz out of the box with ease. Paired with a Z270 chipset board (more than likely an Asus one), it should prove to be quite the budget overclocker. It's a 60W TDP processor, compared to 91W I believe for the full fledged unlocked i5 and i7, so I'm hopeful that the power phases on the board help it reach a high overclock compared to overclocking a thirstier, more expensive CPU.
For clearance reasons, the GTX 690 is 11.0" (280mm) long, and my Seasonic X-650 going into this build is a standard ATX size 160mm length one.