Hello! After a long delay caused by moving, I’m back with the next installment of my blog series on my tech journey. Perhaps I can start another blog series on the fun that is moving, wiring, skim coating, painting, thinset, and all of the other fun stuff I’ve been doing over the past couple of months, but for now I’ll stick to computers.
In my last blog post, I talked about the last pre-built desktop I ever bought. From then on, it’s been nothing but computers I have built myself. Let’s take a look at them over the years.
AMD Athlon
The first computer I built used an AMD Athlon 64, my first 64-bit processor. It had 512MB of RAM, a 16 GB hard drive, and that special 64-bit version of XP to use on these fancy new processors. I bought a cool new case with a window and a cold cathode light to show off my awesome build. I still have a picture 19 years later:
I still had the subwoofer from my Compaq; I wasn’t about to let a decent enough speaker go to waste. In fact, I kept that for about twenty years, give or take.
With that computer I spent a ton of time playing Civilization 4 and Oblivion, playing online poker while it was quasi-legal, and hauling it to (and from) Boston for a month. It served me well, but eventually I moved on to…
AMD Phenom II X4 920
The next computer I built was an AMD Phenom II X4, getting myself into the multi-core era. This one had a whopping 8 GB of memory, 80 GB hard drive, and an even bigger case:
This one got me through grad school, Skyrim, and into our new house. And even though it is now 15 years old, amazingly I still have it: I use it as my Elastic log server. I had to buy a PCIe network card when the ethernet jack on the motherboard died, and I’ve replaced the hard drive once or twice, but it’s still chugging along in a 4U server case.
That lasted me for several years until I got…
AMD FX-8350
I built another computer with twice the cores (8), 32 GB of memory, and a Sapphire DUAL-X Radeon R9 270 video card. This one got me through the births of 2 children and all of the other various life events of the time, and like the predecessor, this one is still around too, as my network file server.
When COVID hit, it was time to upgrade again, this time to…
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X
Another 8-core computer, with 128GB of memory (lots of room for VMs!), and a Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB video card. I ditched the huge old case and got a tinier, sleek version. After all, what was the point of having a bunch of 5ΒΌ” drive bays if CD and DVD drives were obsolete?
Alas, as I alluded to previously, this computer did not survive: it died a couple of months ago as we were preparing to move. As a result, I went to Microcenter and got my current computer…
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X
This is the computer upon which I am typing. Previously, all of my motherboards were Asus, but I decided to go with ASRock this time as I think it was the motherboard that conked out on me. I have 64GB of memory and still using the same video card, since I rarely do anything too fancy these days aside from Microsoft Flight Simulator. Fingers crossed, this will last me a few years.
That wraps up this series, and I hope you enjoyed reading it! Now I’ll have to think of my next series to write.