Another quick(ish) IT aside, but I've been chasing deals on components for the past couple months to do in-place upgrades for our primary workstations/gaming rigs. I used this long holiday weekend to finish assembling everything and get both PROTH and I back up and running OS/software-wise. Residual customization and related detail work will probably continue for another couple weeks as we both settle in, but it feels great to have a fresh installation humming along on improved hardware.
The research, deal-hunting, and eventual assembly are always fun for me, but things were complicated this time around due to especially awful price hikes from Nvidia; sticker shock from the pricey AM5 motherboards and DDR5 needed for AMD's new Zen 4 line of CPUs; crypto shenanigans in the tech sphere that, while less bad now, especially with Ethereum moving to proof of stake, continue to distort the price and availability of discrete GPUs; and all-around awful rates of inflation. I'd normally look to the upper mid-range CPUs from AMD latest generation – likely the impressive 7600X, which is the current successor to our old 2600X – but sticking with souped-up AM4 machines for a couple more years is easy math in our current environment. Plus, I was able to snag an amazing 25% off deal on the gaming powerhouse 5800X3D, and sticking with "older tech" has rarely felt this good in practice (here's a primer on CPU/GPU bottlenecking for reference).
Plus, I'm holding off on possible GPU upgrades for us until next year, when Diablo 4 (me) and Dragon Age 4 (PROTH) should finally grace us with their presence. Our RTX 2070s are still performing admirably at 2K, even if they're starting to show their age in next-gen games, and Nvidia's awful price-gouging for their 4xxx series GPUs doesn't leave me hopeful there will be affordable RTX 4060s of 4070s in our future, so a full shift to Team Red seems imminent. The fact that EVGA and its best-in-class RMA support team has also gotten out of the GPU game entirely makes that decision even easier. AMD's new RDNA 3 GPU architecture looks incredibly promising, and the *comparatively* cheaper and more scalable nature of its chiplet design makes an affordable RDNA3 GPU in the RX 7600-7800XT range seem likely sometime in 2023. And even if a reasonable 7xxx series contender doesn't materialize by then, the RX 6800 XT is still the logical choice.
Otherwise, my 9-to-5 job has been incredibly busy of late, so I'm behind on my after-hours writing projects. I'm fortunately still on track to get one of those side hustles (SH#1, for brevity) wrapped-up in December, even though it will be a few months before I know if it merits any further installments. Either way, having SH#1 done and out the (e)door will at least free me up to refocus on the RW Project again.
So until next time, I hope everyone has a safe, warm, and tasty holiday season. :)
Orbital HQ, out.
