Yesterday I got my new PC build in, and spent most of the afternoon setting it up. It took longer than I anticipated — of course — as the Win10 image I was using didn’t have storage support for my mobo, and I couldn’t load it manually. A fresh download and new ISO did the trick.
I’ve been using the same gaming machine for almost eight years. I bought it before the release of the Oculus CV1, which would have made this last build somewhere around Thanksgiving of 2015. It’s served me well over the years, the only upgrades I’ve done were storage and a RTX 3070. It became apparent after this GPU upgrade that the CPU was terribly behind.
So yesterday I pulled out all the old components out of the case, and spent some time cleaning every fan blade with my little DataVac. I really haven’t built a new PC since this last one, and I was a bit overwhelmed with all the fan and PSU component and connections. I had another miss because the CPU I bought, a i9 11900 something-or-other, didn’t have discrete graphics support, meaning it needed a GPU. I try to fire up the mainboard with as few components as possible, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had no video! So I figured that out, and finally got everything setup late in the evening, and managed to get in a session playing Terra Invicta. I also played Tarkov, but didn’t mess with any of the graphics settings. With vsync off I was getting well over 170 fps, but I didn’t have all the bells and whistles turned on. The one thing I did notice is that my stash pulled up faster, there’s usually a second or two where all the items have to load and it seemed noticeably quicker than usual.
It’s funny because CPU speeds haven’t gotten that much faster. 3.5GHz is about the same as I had before, but the number of cores is a lot more. I didn’t notice things being that much faster, but the system should be able to handle a lot more. I may try running Stable Diffusion on it and see whether it’s faster than my Macbook or Google Colab studio.
So I’ve still got a new case here that I bought. Simpler than the Thermaltake one that I was using before. I’m going to take my old PC components and load it up in the case, then pull the GPU out of Elder’s machine and shuffle them around. Old parts are going to Goodwill. Or maybe Younger, I’m not sure yet.
Right now my office is a huge mess, there’s boxes everywhere, my desk is a wreck, so I need to get busy cleaning that up and putting things away. I’ve got some important meetings this afternoon.
After work we’re loading up the car and taking a road trip, heading to my FIL’s. There’s a fall festival where he lives, and we’re meeting my mom up there as well. I’m also hoping I can get some mountain biking in while we’re there, but we’ll see how that goes.