I was thinking recently that it's been about a year since I moved, only to find when I checked today that it has, in fact, been exactly one year.
It's also been about a month at this point and I haven't mentioned it yet due to being busy, but I'm writing this on a new computer. Well…sort of. A friend of mine recently upgraded his computer out of need (and when it became clear the RAM pricing crisis isn't ending anytime soon), and had a spare motherboard, CPU, and 48 GB of RAM from 2020 which he donated to me. It's DDR4 RAM, which is a generation behind the current standard, but also a generation ahead of the 24 GB of DDR3 RAM I had before. I was just beginning to bump into some constraints with that much RAM, so doubling it has been nice.
It's also an AMD motherboard and CPU (Ryzen 7 5800), in place of my old Intel i5-4690K. I've been intending to switch from Intel to AMD for several years now if I ever had the chance, so this worked out well. While Intel definitely had the advantage in processors for some years, AMD has been steadily closing the gap more recently, especially in areas that mattered to me: AMD processors tend to have more cores and do better at crunching through parallelizable tasks like encoding video. (Both are plenty fast enough for the games I play.) I did do one test where I rendered a short video on my old CPU and the new one, but the photo I took of the time on the old CPU was blurry so I can't say exactly how much faster the new one is (though it is definitely faster; in single-core performance it's rated 4.8 GHz compared to 3.5 GHz for my old CPU).
Near the end of September I took my computer apart and performed the delicate motherboard replacement surgery. It passed mostly without incident, other than needing to make sure various pieces were actually wedged in their sockets good and tight. A CPU cooling fan came along with everything, and since I had no idea if my 2014 watercooling pump would fit in a 2020 motherboard I opted for the fan. One of the four little plastic stand-offs holding the brace for it was missing, so I measured it, went down to my workshop, and cut a new one out of a bit of old dowel with a few minutes' work.
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| The newly-made part… |
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| …installed and keeping those braces off the motherboard. |
As far as I can tell it's doing fine. Not that my computer ever ran particularly loud, but I haven't noticed any big differences in noise – if anything, the new fan might be quieter.
Overall it's been good. I haven't noticed any mind-blowing differences, but things generally do feel a bit snappier. I'll need to get back to video-making or otherwise find some way to stress-test it and see how it performs. We'll see what happens! It's a busy semester for me. A hui hou!
