New PC, Who Dis?

Posted in Anno Domini Tue Jun 17 2025

Getting a new PC has been on my to-do list for quite a long time, but I don't think I'd be alone in saying that I've been putting it off for a long time waiting for the hardware situation to get Not Terrible again. But between a healthy fear of what the ongoing Literally Everything Going On In The World will do to prices and availability[1], the wheels on my long-time PC falling off as I was driving it (CrystalDiskTool's analysis of my battered old SSD started with it sucking in air through its teeth in a doctor's stoic horror[2]) and a handily massive discount at a PC builder due to Easter Sales and coupons, I finally pulled the trigger and bit quite a pricy bullet.

Seems like my timing was, for once, impeccable. The morning of delivery, I turned on my PC and it started making a horrifying grinding sound suggesting that its time had finally come, leaving me bereft and computerless... for about five hours.

Not today, Satan!

The Old Thing

For context, let's look at the box I left behind, which was acquired somewhere in the vicinity of January 2018. A simpler time.

This was pretty damn good for the era I got it, happily shrugging off attempts by Doom 2016 (which I had recently stuttered my way through on my old old box) at being technologically imposing and dealing quite merrily with most of the PS4/XB1 generation of games. The 1070 being the most popular GPU on the Steam Hardware Survey also typically kept most games in my lane.

That's not to say that it was beautiful and perfect, though - the single-core performance wasn't amazing, meaning it struggled with more complex and advanced emulation use-cases like 86Box or 3D games in MAME. In addition, it felt like the hard drive gradually slowed down over the years - by the end, loading the Reelism 2 development folder into SLADE3 wound up taking a good 15 minutes!

And of course, games and the technology they used caught up and surpassed it. Every single Steam Next Fest demo stream I did on Twitch would be interrupted, often multiple times, by some form of technological calamity, usually in the form of a resource-starved OBS crashing and taking half the PC with it because some dipshit indie developer decided 64gb was a good memory budget for a Haunted PS1 horror game. I was able to hold off the grip of technology by grabbing an Xbox Series X during a brief pause in COVID lockdowns[3], but I knew it would only delay the inevitable.

This wasn't the only major tech issue I had with this old box by the end - it developed an odd habit of occasionally deciding upon being turned on that ethernet was for jerks and dropping as many packets as possible for everything plugged into the modem's ethernet unless I went over to the modem and unplugged and replugged everything an arbitrary and random amount of times. I thought this was an issue with the modem for a long time! But as long as I could just Perform The Arcane Ritual to restore online service for the day, I kept putting off getting it dealt with further because that'd require dealing with my ISP. And I dunno if you've ever dealt with ISP phone support before...

I ran the 3DMark demo on Steam on this box shortly before it was consigned to history. The demo lacks all the juiciest tests, but there's enough for a quick, non-scientific comparison.

The New Thing

So, how far of a jump did I manage?

A jump so massive that parts of my brain actually have trouble grappling it a bit, to be honest. Maybe it was growing up with an N64 as a kid, but I kind of have trouble grasping technological advances as Big And Amazing if they're not chugging along at an agonized 8fps. So pulling up Immortals of Avenum, an Unreal Engine 5 game widely hyped as being about as optimised and efficient as tax legislation, and having it run flawlessly without so much as a fuss was actually legitimately confusing. Where's the kaboom? There's supposed to be an Earth-shattering kaboom!

One big addition from leapfrogging several generations of hardware in one fell swoop is that I can actually use raytracing functionality and mess around with that stuff. It all seems a bit gimmicky so far, to be fair, but it's been a decent bit of fun having a bit of a fuckaround with these primitive, primordial implementations. We'll see if it actually amounts to anything - remember, consoles are still shackling things down a bit.

Again, the 3DMark Demo doesn't have all the insane raytracing test shit, but it has enough for a compare and contrast kinda job, and holy hell. Just a minor jump.

And Then, The Troubles

Of course, it couldn't all go smoothly. Otherwise, this'd just be a "yo, lookit the shit i bought!" blog post, which would be so distasteful. Also, it would've been up ages ago, after I set the damn thing up enough to upload blog posts.

I'm a professional vet, and let me tell you: CPUs only do this when they're extremely stressed.
I'm a professional vet, and let me tell you: CPUs only do this when they're extremely stressed.

Fresh out of the box, there was a frankly confusing amount of issues with temperature. For the first couple of boot-ups of the day, the CPU would skyrocket to 90°c temperatures before eventually temperature-throttling and shutting itself off to avoid imperiling itself. Occasionally it would do this at random after hours of stability![4] In short: Most of the time, the CPU Cooler wasn't.

After a month and a half of fucking around with fan curves, plugging and unplugging things, and assorted Arcane Rituals in desperate hope that I'd find the right combination of things to make everything Just Work, I finally gave in and dragged the thing to a local repair shop, expecting/hoping that it'd just need a quick reseat-and-repaste job. Instead, I got the bad-news-good-news tag-team:

This bitch...
This bitch.

So while that bastard of a situation has been put to bed and is no longer costing me more sleep or sanity than I should really care to admit in polite, mixed company, there are still one or two more things that I've had to deal with.

So, Like, What's Even The Point Of This Post

Mostly to point out that I now have more power to do dumber shit to entertain you all, while also lamenting that most of my recent discretionary income is now naught but ash. Also, a reminder that you should absolutely 1000% avoid water cooling at all costs, because much like comic books, it will break your heart.

  1. Yes, I am aware that I do not live in the United States, on account of being allergic to bullets. This stuff does tend to hit everyone in one way or another, though. ↩︎

  2. I think the Health rating the last time I checked was like, 17% or something. ↩︎

  3. Game Pass is fucking amazing. Slightly less amazing now than it used to be, but still a pretty fantastic deal that's got me to play some games I otherwise never would've touched. May the Pantheon of your choosing bless and protect the Power Wash Simulator team for all of time. ↩︎

  4. This was always, without fail, whenever I left the room to go make lunch. Every single time. ↩︎

  5. Times have changed, but I still flagrantly refuse to buy AMD GPUs after my turn-of-the-milennium experiences. AMD CPUs, though? Pretty good! Yet to receive the Scarlet Letter. ↩︎

  6. Next in line for an upgrade, I reckon. These things are at least a decade old, each with their own scars, quirks and weird marks that won't come off... ↩︎

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