Data-driven decision making is the only way to go
PC hardware, software settings, phones, peripherals, whatever. If it’s tech, it’s in Tech.
Quoting Wikipedia, “the Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment about whether an object that has had all of its original components replaced remains the same object.” The PC of Theseus is a system that had almost all of its components replaced, and we just gave it another round of upgrades to dial the existentialism up even further.
Chris’ system from December 2014 had — performance-wise — been un-upgraded for its life, and after a full eight year service life, the sales around Black Friday were a good time to do a full rebuild.
In December of 2016 I helped Michael put together a build I dubbed The Silent Whisper: a high-end gaming PC that had SPCR-level acoustics.
Towards the end of 2022, Michael was looking to upgrade the entire system, so I put on my PC building hat once more and gave him a hand.
Checking these out seemed like a natural extension of reviewing my video/audio settings, so I figured I’d do a quick write-up on what I learnt.
Continue reading “Bonus: A Quick Look at Next-gen Image Formats (JPEG XL etc)”
Phase 1 of my big upgrade/migration project was a good chance to reevaluate my recording/rendering settings, so as here’s an extra write-up relating to that.
Continue reading “PC/NAS Upgrade: Re-Evaluating Video and Audio Encoding in OBS and Vegas”
Also known as the part where we fix all of the storage and storage-related things.
Continue reading “PC/NAS Upgrade: OS Reinstall, 71TB of Storage, and Setting up an Unraid NAS”
Over time, my main PC has been increasingly struggling to meet my needs, largely relating to dated CPU/GPU, lack of storage space, and low data resilience.
This very extended project aims to fix most of that while also including the broad outlines for future upgrade plans.
At the end of last year, I documented the never-built parts list for my dad’s PC.
Now, nearly 26 months since the original parts list request, that system has finally been purchased and assembled – and at just about the worst possible time.
Continue reading “26 Months Later: My Dad’s PC Build (July/August 2020)”
Back in April of this year, Nick — who I helped with a gaming PC back in 2014 — was looking for a new system to get him a step up in performance. His old system was going to be given away / sold, so simply upgrading that was not in the cards.
The new system was to have essentially the same purpose and priorities as his existing system. The budget wasn’t particularly strict as long as it was under 2K and performance needs were met, but I obviously also didn’t want to just burn his money. Some people like to spend right up to the allocated machine’s budget, whereas others just set an amount as the maximum and leave the specifics up to me. Nick is the latter.
For me, a history of building systems began before I’d ever technically “built a system”.
Note: despite being published in 2019, this was actually written primarily in 2017. I had wanted to release it alongside part 1, which unfortunately got caught in “people not responding to questions” limbo.
Continue reading “Systems I’ve Helped Build – Part 0: Introduction”