Evolution of Battle Station over years

[Psittac]

I'm bored and thought I'd dig up the photo's I could find of my battle station over the past 8 or so years and leave some commentary.  The photo's are very incomplete but it's a stroll down memory lane.

 

My first DIY PC was back in 03/04 and it was an AMD Athlon XP-M overclocked to 2.8ghz on water.  My bench's beat everyone on every forum for that platform.  After that I built a Pentium-D and thought I was shitting in tall cotton because I could do more than one intensive task at a time.  By this time I was out of the loop pretty hard but decided to build a 3570k with a gtx 670? and when my friend came over to see how elite my computer was he said, oh nevermind, because I was still on an hdd.  I soon upgraded to an ssd and that was the last time I had a revolutionary jump forward in day to day usage.  You can see this PC in one of the pic's in the background.  This PC is now being used by my blind friend as a daily and it's old faithful, does everything he can ask of it without fail.

 

Finally I decided to be an enthusiast again and had some sort of income, so I went to micro center and said "I heard they have more than 4 cores now" and was sold an x99 platform but it was a poor overclocker so I built a new one soon after.  I had just found LTT and JayzTwoCents and was obsessed with the idea of custom water cooling but made a huge number of mistakes in hardware and got stuck with intel when I should have jumped ship to AMD (zen 1).  I had the intel block so decided to go for a Z270 7700k and that thing clocked to 5ghz but I was stuck on a dead platform right when the 4+ core boom was starting.  I stuck that rig out until early 2020 when 9 month's of trouble shooting couldn't figure out the sudden locks, BSOD and black screens with reboots.  My best guess in hind sight was malware and antivirus not getting along after enough updates even after white listing eachother (I used same ssd with same OS on new machine and eventually had the same symptoms).  Along the way I set up two enterprise servers for plex and general backup but since getting my new zen2 system have retired them and replaced them with my all in one desktop.

 

 

This system was supposed to be my peace de resistance.  Rather it was unstable and a poor clocker requiring zero water cooling.  Also for a full sized case I went with very small hard lined tubing. (3570 in glorious corsair cube case in background)

 

I think the gpu here was either a r9 390 nittro or maybe I had my 1070 at this point, I doubt it though. *edit: I never took my 2 r9 390 water blocks out of the box, this was the 1070

 

 

A couple glorious RGB shots

 

I soon got tired of this machine and weary of the glorious 5ghz available on *mainstream and grew to hate my tiny hard line loop.  So I built a Z270 system which I too grew to regret.  I kept the main components of the loop and used a 1070fe.  Let me tell you of all of the now useless watercooling parts I have. (don't order directly from EKWB, the shipping to return something is more than the product is worth).  I used this 7700k/7600k for about 4 years and it served me well.  While the x99 got very little use the kaby lake system took me into a new house and through all of my gaming locations.  At first in the basement ending in the spare bedroom.  Oh and I finally had a quality loop even if the fans didn't last much longer.

 

 

Eventually I got a more permanent setup in a finished space

 

 

 

 

 

[Psittac]

My setup has evolved rapidly over the past year or two since getting into a finished space.

 

 

Here is the system with the new at the time 3900x and 2080super in the old nzxt case

 

 

I still had the two enterprise servers running at the time because I didn't have anywhere to put the 8 3.5" hdd's to transfer everything

 

 

But I got a case that could hold everything and decomissioned the dell poweredges.

 

 

Added an entry level "audiophile" rack

 

[Psittac]

Then within the past month I added another ultrawide and turned the second monitor vertical and got new bookshelf speakers.  I also did the 7" touchscreen system monitor.  When I added the monitor I also added the keyboard tray

 

 

*This is what I do with my life, I'm almost 40 no wife kids child support or alimony and no girlfriend.  I work and sit here so the money I make goes towards this