New Hardware

Well - the time has come for me to upgrade my machine. The current build has been in place for 6 years and has performed really well, though the processor died in 2020 and had to be replaced. So, apart from a brain transplant, the machine has been flawless. That said, it was getting long in the tooth, so I priced out a new system and it was going to be, well - expensive. Very expensive. But of more concern, adding a new machine to the fold would put me over my allowed installs of the software I use, so upgrading the current machine seems like a good way to go. My friend Michael has built many machines and was dumb enough to agree to help me put it together - and by help, I mean he did all the work while I fretted.

So I kept the motherboard and the processor which are:

Motherboard: ROG STRIX TRX90-XE GAMING and the chip is a AMD 32 core Ryzen Threadripper 3970x. It’s three years old, but still work great and pack a punch.

The Power supply from the old machine was also deemed savable as it’s a good unit and has plenty of power to go around. Everything else was bought new from NewEgg and Amazon:

Case: Phanteks Eclipse G500A Performance Mid Tower Case, Black
CPU Liquid Cooler: Corsair iCUE H150i RGB Elite Liquid CPU Cooler 360mm
RAM: Kingston FURY Beast 128GB (4x32GB) 3600MT/s DDR4 CL18
GPU: GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090 24GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 x16 ATX Video Card

I also added a 8TB Samsung SSD and a Samsung 4TB NVMe SSD so we’ve eliminated spinning discs from the whole machine. I also splurged for a Samsung 49” curved monitor, which, after years of working on 2 split monitors is an amazing upgrade and I highly recommend.

So far, it’s been a total screamer and the updated to the GPU and overall cooling of this new case have made the machine loads faster and quieter to work with. I look forward to really putting it through the paces in the coming new year. While all a bit nerve wracking, I now understand the process of what goes into these machines and feel like I can upgrade and take of this machine better. Thanks to Michael for all your tireless research, work, and text therapy. Here’s some images (with the old liquid cooler before we swapped to the iCUE).