I hate changing tech so I really just wanted to pop the CPU out and plonk in a stronger one. I figured it’d be a cheaper job than just building a completely new system, which to be fair it is.
My new computer is running on a Ryzen 9 7900X3D, alongside an Intel Arc A770 LE. The last-gen graphics cards cost way too much where I live, and the current gen I don’t really want to touch with their crazy power consumption and proclivity for spontaneous combustion, coupled with their ridiculous prices. Figured I’d give Intel a go, and I’m actually really satisfied with it!
My biggest “wow” moment was honestly opening up a project in Synthesizer V and seeing it all render instantaneously, whereas before I’d need to wait for some 10-15 seconds for it to build a buffer for a small part of the song. Doesn’t even matter how many tracks I have, it’s so speedy!
The big problem with popping a new CPU in is how slow all the other stuff on your mobo is. Your old mobo maybe has one m.2 port? Might even be SATA m.2? We never used it on the 4670k machine. Also RAM speeds, if you could pop a 13900k in there, it’d be right crippled by DDR3. Always new mobo with new CPU for me. Also because I upgrade my CPU every 7-9 years, and stuff changes insanely. My partner’s mobo has FOUR GOSH DANG m.2 SLOTS. FOUR! We almost went SATA-less but had an unopened 4TB HDD so we popped that in there.
No m.2. I was overall okay with the speed, it just wasn’t completely keeping up. The way I see it, if I could’ve plopped out the CPU and swapped for something a few years newer, like 2017 or so, I’d probably have been much less inclined to build a new computer altogether.
I don’t like switching tech much. It’s such a hassle. I kept my OnePlus One around until 2020, at which point I replaced it with a second-hand iPhone XS because Apple supports their phones forever by phone standards. I work as a software dev, so I already spend 8 hours of my day mucking about with tech, it’s not something I’m overly keen on doing in my off hours.
Thus far I’m really enjoying m.2, it’s a lot smoother than running cables and stuff for a SATA drive. I have a few SATA ports I believe but I still have a m.2 slot open, so we’ll see! I think I’m more keen on getting a NAS for storage at this point.
I was an immediate Android adopter with the Dream/G1, then the G2 when it released. Then my partner got an iPhone. I played with it for like a half hour, and was like “this is so goddamn smooth.” I switched to an iPhone 5, and used it for ALMOST FIVE YEARS! They did give me a free battery replacement, but after five years, it still worked just fine. I’m a hardcore PC enthusiast (currently have three machines I’ve built, one more in progress, and a SFF in planning) but I’m never switching back from iPhones. My G1 got hella slow after like a year (understandable; it’s new tech) and custom ROMs helped. Same story with G2 (nightmare to install custom ROM on that…)
I also work on computers all day, and play on computers at home. I just want a phone that goes fast, can handle me never deleting a single text, and can go fast with 10k+ photos, even 3-5 years old. iOS DOMINATES this. I never have to do a full format, I restart my phone maybe once every two months. I don’t like or use iTunes except to make the easiest fucking incremental full system images ever. When I finally got a new phone, I plugged it in, clicked NEW PHONE, and it made it EXACTLY THE SAME as my previous phone. Zero effort. I’m on an XS max now and I’m only considering upgrading because the new models have 120hz screens, which ugh… yum. Also would be nice to have less ISO grain when taking low light cat pix.
Haha I feel this. I have to say I rather miss early smartphone days. Just looked up the Dream G1 and it was such a fun design. There’s almost no innovation nowadays which makes sense, market segment has stabilised. At most we see those rubbish foldables with screens that break over a weekend.
I’m likely sticking to Apple too. I absolutely have my gripes with them, but when it works (which is most of the time) it works really well. I had an Android/Google smart TV box on my dumb TV, and it was okay. Super laggy, very unresponsive, crashed every so often, but once it worked it was mostly fine. Sometimes there were audio sync issues and whatnot. Got an Apple TV a while ago and it’s dreamy by comparison. It also slots in with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I can watch films and whatnot late at night, with surround sound in my earbuds, while my roomie is sleeping soundly in the other room.
My gripes are mostly with the platforms being so locked down. I wish I could get xbox game stream on the Apple TV, but because of the vetting process it’s not allowed on iOS at all.
Funny thing about upgrading phones, I was thinking about maybe swapping to the new phone this year, not because I strictly need it (though my camera has some sort of blemish) but the potential USB-C port is very tantalising. Now I’m thinking about holding off until the self-swappable batteries might come. Unsure if my XS would hold up until 2027 or beyond, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. The battery has under 80% health, but still runs at peak performance so I’ve not bothered having it changed. Changing it would also only cost about $70 so it’s not a huge deal either.
Sure, it’s a walled garden. A very well protected one at that, almost like a prison. But it’s a damned nice garden. I’m still entertaining the thought of buying one of the new ARM minis.
I’ve considered an Apple TV! But we went with just tons of desktop computers instead. Every screen has a computer on it, so we can stream/torrent/do anything we want.
One is old and has one 80mm fan only. Phenom II, for reference. It’s LOUD. but it worked well enough.
We’re actually replacing that with an M2 Mac Mini next week. The cheap one, but with the dock w/internal SSD port (1TB=60USD) and an external HDD to back stuff up with. We don’t NEED that for just doing general computer tasks, but we DO something to manage our 120k-150k photos we have. And I hate to say it, but nothing comes close to iPhoto for sorting that many photos.
I hate changing tech so I really just wanted to pop the CPU out and plonk in a stronger one. I figured it’d be a cheaper job than just building a completely new system, which to be fair it is.
My new computer is running on a Ryzen 9 7900X3D, alongside an Intel Arc A770 LE. The last-gen graphics cards cost way too much where I live, and the current gen I don’t really want to touch with their crazy power consumption and proclivity for spontaneous combustion, coupled with their ridiculous prices. Figured I’d give Intel a go, and I’m actually really satisfied with it!
My biggest “wow” moment was honestly opening up a project in Synthesizer V and seeing it all render instantaneously, whereas before I’d need to wait for some 10-15 seconds for it to build a buffer for a small part of the song. Doesn’t even matter how many tracks I have, it’s so speedy!
That’s a FANTASTIC machine!
The big problem with popping a new CPU in is how slow all the other stuff on your mobo is. Your old mobo maybe has one m.2 port? Might even be SATA m.2? We never used it on the 4670k machine. Also RAM speeds, if you could pop a 13900k in there, it’d be right crippled by DDR3. Always new mobo with new CPU for me. Also because I upgrade my CPU every 7-9 years, and stuff changes insanely. My partner’s mobo has FOUR GOSH DANG m.2 SLOTS. FOUR! We almost went SATA-less but had an unopened 4TB HDD so we popped that in there.
No m.2. I was overall okay with the speed, it just wasn’t completely keeping up. The way I see it, if I could’ve plopped out the CPU and swapped for something a few years newer, like 2017 or so, I’d probably have been much less inclined to build a new computer altogether.
I don’t like switching tech much. It’s such a hassle. I kept my OnePlus One around until 2020, at which point I replaced it with a second-hand iPhone XS because Apple supports their phones forever by phone standards. I work as a software dev, so I already spend 8 hours of my day mucking about with tech, it’s not something I’m overly keen on doing in my off hours.
Thus far I’m really enjoying m.2, it’s a lot smoother than running cables and stuff for a SATA drive. I have a few SATA ports I believe but I still have a m.2 slot open, so we’ll see! I think I’m more keen on getting a NAS for storage at this point.
I was an immediate Android adopter with the Dream/G1, then the G2 when it released. Then my partner got an iPhone. I played with it for like a half hour, and was like “this is so goddamn smooth.” I switched to an iPhone 5, and used it for ALMOST FIVE YEARS! They did give me a free battery replacement, but after five years, it still worked just fine. I’m a hardcore PC enthusiast (currently have three machines I’ve built, one more in progress, and a SFF in planning) but I’m never switching back from iPhones. My G1 got hella slow after like a year (understandable; it’s new tech) and custom ROMs helped. Same story with G2 (nightmare to install custom ROM on that…)
I also work on computers all day, and play on computers at home. I just want a phone that goes fast, can handle me never deleting a single text, and can go fast with 10k+ photos, even 3-5 years old. iOS DOMINATES this. I never have to do a full format, I restart my phone maybe once every two months. I don’t like or use iTunes except to make the easiest fucking incremental full system images ever. When I finally got a new phone, I plugged it in, clicked NEW PHONE, and it made it EXACTLY THE SAME as my previous phone. Zero effort. I’m on an XS max now and I’m only considering upgrading because the new models have 120hz screens, which ugh… yum. Also would be nice to have less ISO grain when taking low light cat pix.
Haha I feel this. I have to say I rather miss early smartphone days. Just looked up the Dream G1 and it was such a fun design. There’s almost no innovation nowadays which makes sense, market segment has stabilised. At most we see those rubbish foldables with screens that break over a weekend.
I’m likely sticking to Apple too. I absolutely have my gripes with them, but when it works (which is most of the time) it works really well. I had an Android/Google smart TV box on my dumb TV, and it was okay. Super laggy, very unresponsive, crashed every so often, but once it worked it was mostly fine. Sometimes there were audio sync issues and whatnot. Got an Apple TV a while ago and it’s dreamy by comparison. It also slots in with the rest of the Apple ecosystem, so I can watch films and whatnot late at night, with surround sound in my earbuds, while my roomie is sleeping soundly in the other room.
My gripes are mostly with the platforms being so locked down. I wish I could get xbox game stream on the Apple TV, but because of the vetting process it’s not allowed on iOS at all.
Funny thing about upgrading phones, I was thinking about maybe swapping to the new phone this year, not because I strictly need it (though my camera has some sort of blemish) but the potential USB-C port is very tantalising. Now I’m thinking about holding off until the self-swappable batteries might come. Unsure if my XS would hold up until 2027 or beyond, but I wouldn’t be too surprised. The battery has under 80% health, but still runs at peak performance so I’ve not bothered having it changed. Changing it would also only cost about $70 so it’s not a huge deal either.
Sure, it’s a walled garden. A very well protected one at that, almost like a prison. But it’s a damned nice garden. I’m still entertaining the thought of buying one of the new ARM minis.
I’ve considered an Apple TV! But we went with just tons of desktop computers instead. Every screen has a computer on it, so we can stream/torrent/do anything we want.
One is old and has one 80mm fan only. Phenom II, for reference. It’s LOUD. but it worked well enough.
We’re actually replacing that with an M2 Mac Mini next week. The cheap one, but with the dock w/internal SSD port (1TB=60USD) and an external HDD to back stuff up with. We don’t NEED that for just doing general computer tasks, but we DO something to manage our 120k-150k photos we have. And I hate to say it, but nothing comes close to iPhoto for sorting that many photos.