Where did the five years go? My wife's gaming PC upgrade!

In 2020, I upgraded my wife's computer. Before this, it was an old laptop that I had handed down to her from quite possibly five years earlier. It could barely game, but it was of solid build quality. Her computer was a gaming beast, to her eyes, with a 1080ti, (which was already ageing at the time, but was still a beast) - then it got an upgrade somewhere along the way when I got a 4090 and she got my 3080.

She doesn't have as many gaming demands as I do.

But recently, she started a new work from home job, and she has been enjoying PC gaming a lot more. But I haven't been enjoying watch her play PC games at chuggy, low frame rates. She doesn't seem to notice, because she has never really known better.

She also can't tell the difference between 1080p, 1440p and 4K. So ... there's that. But in her old machine, the i5- 10500 (no K!) was a severe bottleneck to her gaming performance.

With the news that the price of DRAM and other components due to increase dramatically in the next little bit (TLDR, AI companies pre-ordering production capacity) - I figured that some time in the last week of October was a good as time as any to potentially avoid some of the price hikes.

And if the prices do drop, I'll just claim the difference back on my credit card price protection. I do not suspect that they will drop, but I have two years to wait and see.

My wife's new computer now has higher single core performance than my own. That's okay, I prefer to have multicore performance for the workloads I throw at my machine.

The new machine is powered by a 9800X3D, cooled by a Peerless Assassin 140 CPU cooler, equipped with 64GB of RAM, and all sits on a B850 motherboard. For a budget board, I am impressed with its capabilities, noticeably the VRM heatsinks, 2.5GBe Ethernet, PCI-E 5.0 compatibility, and four DIMM slots.

We have re-used her existing SSDs. The 970EVO runs windows, for her day job. The Lexar Drive runs Bazzite, for her gaming, and for everything else. I suggested she use Arch, but there was some resistance around the comfort of using Bazzite. So while it is probably leaving some performance, features, and other support on the table, you know what they say, happy wife, happy life.

We reused the case, reused the GPU, and reused the power supply.

She is very happy playing titles like Baldur's Gate 3, Pressure Washer Simulator, and other odds and ends. I wonder what game will really push the system, given that Baldur's Gate 3 is probably the most intense thing she plays on the PC.

I do very much hope that this rig will last her another five years, at which case, I can upgrade mine, and give her my 4090. I do not plan to upgrade my personal machine until at least 2029. That will mean that my AM4 platform motherboard (a X570) would have been in service for ten years, and two CPU upgrades.

I am hoping I can stretch it out that long, as I am having no performance issues running the applications I use everyday.

The only problems we encountered when installing Linux on the new machine was something self inflicted - my ventoy USB key with my linux distributions on it had an old version of Bazzite, which had an older kernel with no support for the 2.5GBe controller on the board, so we had to painstakingly update the kernel via wifi. So slow. Not really, but a small thing to complain about - considering that I didn't really want to have a board with wifi on it - as the whole house is wired for ethernet. In any case, it came in handy.

The ethernet adapter works after updating the kernel.