Your history sounds exactly like the spiral of component replacement that is being discussed. it sounds like your replaced everything multiple times, but just kept the case.

You are literally the only person saying that out this this whole exchange.

His ‘fainting’ was likely cardiac arrest. It sounds a lot like heart attack symptoms.

I have heard of this happening to people in the US who work in finance. It’s never ‘overwork’ here. It’s just a heart attack from poor life style choices.

This post is about new builds, upgrades and using old parts with new ones.

Unless you’re going above your current PSU’s rating that thing’s good until it’s dead.

Power supplies will work well past the point of providing clean in spec power on each rail. Lots of parts in a power supply can stop working properly before it physically no longer passes power.

Unless the PSU is relatively new it’s not a great idea to put it into a new build with testing that it is still in spec on each voltage rail under a load.

From a pure aesthetics standpoint hubs and cables suck. From a functional standpoint they are equivalent except for the GPU.

I’ve used the same PSU and case and drives and network card for a decade

How many full backups do you have of the data on a decade old drive?

Storage is one of the most relevant things to be continually replacing. I have decade old drives as well but they live in tandem with their replacements as mirrors. Until recently storage was so insanely cheap there was little reason not to replace it.

The idea of the article is that by the time you go to upgrade , beyond the minor ones, your desktop you are most likely replacing the whole thing.

This isn’t against desktops. It’s against idea that a desktop is significantly more future proof than another form factor.

And if you are buying a 5090… a newer CPU platform is like a drop in the bucket.

That is the point of the article.

The problem my friends has is that he is rendering video so he has a high performance Sas host adapter on the same PCI bus as the GPU. He upgraded both hoping the 5090 would play nicer with the sas adapter but he can’t pull full disk bandwith and render images at the same time. Maybe it’s ok for gaming, not for compute and writing to disk.

The thing with power supplies, they continue to provide enough power long after they lose the ability to provide clean power under load. Only when they are really on their last legs will they actually stop providing the rated power. I have seem a persistent networking issue resolved by swapping a power supply. Most of the time you don’t test a power supply under load to understand if each rail is staying where it needs to be.

Technology moves on. The highest spec iPads blow away older workstation class pc’s for non-gpu loads. It would only be the OS holding that back, not the hardware.

Exactly HOW much more do you have to spend on a system that is upgradable like that? It’s goddamn significant.

You are now cleanly in the enterprise space.

You upgrade the whole system because the piecemeal upgrades don’t make a significant impact and the larger upgrade is basically a whole system.

It great to work on systems as a hobby, I do it. If I take an older system and swap in a 5090 for a 1080 it’s because I can, not because it makes a difference.

The improvements have drastically slowed. No longer will a 1 generation bump be a worthwhile improvement. Once you get to 2 generations enough stuff changes that it’s not as meaningful to upgrade.

Typically I’ve seen a motherboard supports about 2 generations of gpu before some underlying technology makes it no longer can keep up.

If you are going from a 30 series to a 50 series gpu there is going to be a need for increased pci bandwidth in terms of lanes and pcie- spec for it to be fully utilized.

I just saw this play out with a coworker where he replaced 2x3090 with a 5090. The single card is faster but now the he can’t fully task his storage and gpu at the same time due to pci-lane limits. So it’s a new motherboard, which needs a new cpu which needs new ram.

Basically a 2 generation gpu upgrade needs a whole new system.

Each generation of pcie doubles bandwith so a future 2x pcie-6 gpu will need an 8x pcie 4 worth of bandwidth.

Even then gpu’s and cpu have been getting more power hungry. Unless you over spec your psu there is a reasonable chance once you get past 2 gpu generations you need a bigger Psu. Power supplies are wear items. They continue to function, but may not provide power as cleanly when you get to 5+ years of continuous use.

Sure you can keep the case and psu but literally everything else will run thunderbolt or usb-c without penalties.

At this point why not run storage outside the box for anything sizeable? Anything fast runs on nvme internal.

All of the peripherals will carry on to any new system. With usb-c basically all you need to run in your case is a gpu and nvme.

Throw in thunderbolt and networking as well as hdd based das won’t be bottlenecked.

Yeah desktops can have more ram than laptops and that is the one case where a desktop can really shine. Even then there is usually a pretty big ram limit you need to pass.

IMAX is 4K or less content. Its edge is special projection that can look good and brighter on huge screens.

Only imax film prints are significantly better than anything else

I mean it’s clearly a mental illness. He could be using safety gear. He’s climbing like this for a rush.

Dang. I don’t know what that is but it looks cool.

I didn’t say comparable. I said good enough.

Ai does work great, at some stuff. The problem is pushing it into places it doesn’t belong.

It’s a good grammar and spell check. It helps me get a lot of English looking more natural.

It’s also great for troubleshooting consumer electronics.

It’s far better at search than google.

Even then it can only help, not replace folks or complete tasks.