Comercial rig

Amazon are a very good source of refurbished machines, search for Amazon Renewed. However you are unlikely to get anything that will be capable of W11.

Another option is to buy a motherboard bundle, CCL do lots of them. That way you get the tricky CPU installation done and you still get to build it yourself.

Option 3 is a mini PC, I’m using lots of them commercially. They are quite hard to get your hands on at the moment, only the extreme ends available – Celerons of i7 / R7.

Option 4 let me assemble what you have and supply a new motherboard, or if you’ve sent it all back I’ll build whatever you want and put Windows and other software on there if you wish. The difference if I do it compared to one of the shops is you’ll be getting exactly what you want and not from a list of parts. I’m not going to charge you for doing it and you’ll get whatever warranty is on the parts rather than a basic year.

I bought an AMD one for a customer a few month ago when CPU were hard to get hold of. Absolutely fine.

John, I have two AMD CPUs here with pins so bent I actually killed one attempting to straighten them. So I’ll decline the chance to screw up another bit of kit with a needle 🙂

Yes the motherboard can use your M2 SSD, I don’t know why they don’t use them, saving a few £ I expect. Your M2 drive is advertised as “gaming” as it’s ideal for that, but it’s nothing special, just very quick.

By all means use it, but to make your life easier unplug the 2.5″ SSD before you install Windows so you know you’re installing to the right one! After Windows is running you can plug it back in and use it as extra storage or put it on E-Bay. IIRC it was a well known make, they don’t sell crap ones anyway.