A year back, I’d rebuilt my desktop with some components from home and most others bought here. I was pretty happy for the most part - however, there was one aspect that kept annoying and worrying me - the temperatures. I noticed that the temperatures were running hotter than usual. Idle temperatures were more than 80 degrees, and full-load temperatures crossing 90 degrees. To reduce the temperatures, I tried various options including BIOS updates, adding in some new intake fans and changing the fan curves but those did not help.

It’s been more than 7 years since I last built my home desktop. It hadn’t remained static - there had been a steady trickle of updates over the years but the base foundation: the processor motherboard cabinet remained the same. The processor I had i.e., the Core i5 3470) wasn’t exactly top-of-the-line back then, it had still enough horsepower, especially coupled with the GPU (nVidia Geforce 970, replaced later with the Geforce 1080) to crunch anything that I could throw at it, VR included (check my previous post for my impressions of the Oculus Rift).

It’s been about 4 years since I built Hellforge. It’s gotten some updates: Replaced Gigabyte 7750 with an Asus Strix 970 Added on a Samsung Evo 840 256GB Memory upped to 16GB Replaced the Logitech K210 keyboard with a Corsair K70 Lux RGB Replaced the CM default case fans with Bitfenix Spectre But the one thing that has remained constant: the CPU heat sink and cooler. My old house was dusty and no matter how much I cleaned, within a week or two there’d be quite a lot of dust.

So when I resigned from CGI, I thought I’d have to stay through the entire 2 month notice period with the org. However, since there was no dependency on me, I was hoping for an early release and thankfully that did happen. I initially thought of joining the new job right away but decided to take a month-long break from work and relax for a month. A month seemed quite a lot, however the days went by so fast I didn’t even realise that my break was over.

Jo’s been inquiring about a new system since quite some time - her current laptop is in a state of broken mess(half the keys don’t work/battery ded etc) and she’d require me to give up my desktop if she needed to work on something for a bit. She does read quite a bit, but that’s something she’s sorted using the Kindle PaperWhite and her Nexus 5X. Past Friday, she gave me a reminder about having it would be nice and me being a bit free, decided to come up with a new build.

I’ve been tinkering with computers for well over 15 years now - and since 2007 I’ve been using laptops almost exclusively - prime reason being space(or the lack of it) since I moved away from my home, to a new city. Staying in a PG meant there was no space. Since the past year and half I’ve been in Bangalore, staying in a rented house and though wanted to own a desktop, there wasn’t a decent justification to get it, especially since my laptop, HP Envy 14 was coping well.