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I finally upgraded my PC

It was with great sorrow that yesterday, I consigned my trusty old i5 2400 PC to the corner of the room.

That machine has been my daily drive for more years than I care to remember and although it's had a couple of new power supplies, a RAM upgrade, new CPU coolers, countless fan replacements and gone from an old Segate spinner to a much faster SSD, it's basically a really old box.

It's been running 24 hours a day, 7 days a week since about 2012 which, if I do the math, represents over 100,000 hours of continuous operation.

I can't grizzle about that.

So what am I using now?

Well I've jumped ship from Intel to AMD, something that I suspect surprises nobody.

As is always the case, I've avoided buying the latest generation of hardware because there's generally a stiff premium associated with doing so. There's a fair amount of money to be saved by foregoing a few percent of raw performance and buying stuff from a generation or two before the current gen.

I've also avoided the temptation to simply rush out and buy a prebuilt box with the associated compromises that sometimes are involved.

Instead, I've spent the last year or so just picking up bargains when I see them. An SSD here, a power supply there, etc, etc. That allowed me to save a snotload of cash when compared to buying a prebuilt off the shelf, even when such systems are on special.

After all this I've ended up with a Ryzen 5600G CPU that gives me six cores at a reasonable clock-speed and an "adequate" iGPU onboard. Given that this machine is only really used for web-surfing, text editing and general computing tasks, the iGPU will be perfectly adequate -- even though I've got an old GTX1060/6 that I may end up throwing in this box eventually.

This is only a DDR4 system so I've thrown a couple of 8GB RAM modules in there which is more than enough for anything I need to run under the Linux Mint operating system.

The case is nothing fancy -- which was a choice I deliberately made. Although it came with some RGB crap pre-installed, that is not wired up. My computers should sit silently and simply do binary stuff -- not try to turn the whole damned room into an acid trip with their illuminary antics. In fact, this box is totally devoid of any lights, aside from a couple of status LEDs on the front planel.

The case does however, have a bunch of fans which (for the time being) are almost totally silent in operation. I do have some high-quality Noctura replacements sitting in a box under my desk though, because I know that cheap fans invariably start rattling and grinding after just a few months when operated 24/7. If there's one thing I can't stand it's a noisy fan or fans!

While on the subject of fans -- I'm only running the stock CPU cooler and despite having watched a few YT videos, the current CPU temperatures are hovering around 30 degrees C (just eight degrees above ambient). My goodness these AMD CPUs are efficient!

As mentioned above, I'm running Linux Mint for my OS (a I have done for a very long time now) but I've upgraded to a later version. It's ticking over very smoothly except that none of my video files show thumbnails in the file manager. WTF?

Yes, all the codecs are present and everything *should* work but even after much googling all I can see is that sometimes this happens on newer versions of Mint running Cinnamon.

Oh well, not a deal-breaker but annoying none the less.

The upside of all these changes are that this thing runs like silk, far better than the old system which would sometimes grind almost to a halt with all four cores pegged as Firefox got a bit confused and consumed a huge chunk of the available system memory. Having six real cores (12 virtual) running at a much higher clock speed and using DDR4 rather than DDR3 memory means that this machine is super-fast compared to the one it has replaced.

What was the total price I ended up paying for all these parts?

I don't recall exactly, because the bits were purchased over many months, however I'm pretty sure it was under $600 all-up thanks mainly to the super deals I waited for.

Looking at prebuilts, the only thing I see that comes close to this price are a bunch of "Chromebox" units with wimpy Celeron processors.

I think I have done well. In fact (GPU aside), this box is now significantly faster than the machine I use for video editing and that cost me $2K just four years ago. Damn, I suspect another upgrade is looming!

Carpe Diem folks!

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