Valentines day passed but that doesn’t mean I can’t talk about my love..of computers! (sorry for missing last week )
Yes, this is the build
A recap of my computer building experience, I started with a prebuilt hot mess mini tower with 4gb of ddr3, 2 cores, and Radeon 3000 graphics on the motherboard. The second iteration of the build process was simply adding a graphics card, a Geforce GT 530. The Fermi-based GPU had a whopping 96 Cuda cores and clocked at 700 MHz running 1gbs of delicious ddr3 memory. This allowed me to run league of legends, combat arms, and MapleStory at relatively decent frames. Then as I mention later I tried starcraft ii and learned hard what CPU bottlenecking was. The old Athlon ii with its two cores was running full tilt to keep up with the Zergs spawning meanwhile all the Protoss templars teleporting around. Yeah, 10-15fps on low wasn’t ideal.
Dem angles doh!
So my next adventure was to upgrade the CPU! Some how I didn’t screw it up by getting the wrong part and snagged an AMD Phenom 965 x4 black edition for about 120$. This sucker was a 4 core CPU running stock at 3.4 GHz and a tdp of 125watts. Later on I managed to run it @ 3.7ghz with 1.38 volts! Baller status…well there was a problem… to get it up to that point I needed a better cooler and with the help of my friends brother, the computer science major, he recommended the Evo 212 which is still Phenomenal *pun intended you know AMD Phenom…eherm anyway the thing wouldn’t fit cause I still had the tiny micro case. I literally stuck the stock cooler from the Athlon dual core on it, left it stock, and it actually ran ok for the most part. I had to order a case and power supply because the prebuild was mass produced and micro ATX so it had tight dimensions.
So clean
When everything arrived it took a few hours and everything was all together with some troubleshooting here and there. But my rig was together and running well. The next step was to add a Geforce gtx 550 ti this was around when Skyrim came out and I could not play it on the old gt 530. Mostly due to the cost of the 560ti I decided to choose the 550ti. It was a mid-tier card at the time and I got it with Batman Arkham city plus 25$ rebate card! It had 1 gig of Gddr5, 192 cuda cores and ran at 800 mhz. This was my first true build. The other ones was a refreshers and the next full built I went to Intel with Radeon Graphics for 5 years. But as a Homage to my first build I went back to AMD and Nvidia in 2019 and man does it feel good. The build now consists of a Ryzen 1700 8c/16th running at 3.7ghz ( coincidence?!) @1.18 volts a full 2 times the core count and 4 times the thread count with about half the wattage! 4 times the ram at 16gbs, and a gtx 1070ti that runs at double the mhz of the 550ti, 8 times the ram, and over 12 time the cuda cores! This was about a 10 year jump and it surprises me that in this time technology improved so much despite the whole ” we can’t continue Moores law” thing from intel. Sure the processors in computers haven’t reached the 10nm yet and 7nms seem way far out,but that’s not to say tech hasn’t improved dramatically. I mean now phones are on the 7nm process! Reeling it back in this is why I fell in love with technology. Sure there are things we would like right away, but seeing and savoring all the small little changes over time really adds up to a such an amazing journey and greater appreciation of how things were up until now.
