the corner office : tech blog

It's taken 11 loooong years since we moved to the UK, but I finally have a desktop PC again.

We've always had laptops because until we moved into the new house, we've never had a dedicated study - so always shuffling between spare room and living room as needed. This time around I hadn't actually thought about getting a PC, and was pretty close to ordering a new laptop when it I thought... why not?

One thing I learned - again - is that buying a laptop is far less complicated than buying a PC. All told, I spent nearly a month getting my head around the latest and greatest in PC hardware. Along the way I discovered PCPartPicker (great site), did a heap of research, waited (im)patiently for all the parts to arrive, built it (without frying or destroying anything), and am now a happy desktop owner, again.

The goal was a beefy PC with lots of memory, running Linux. A solid development machine, not a gaming machine, but with a 'you never know' at the back of my mind. I ended up with an AMD Ryzen 1700 (I'm a sucker for an underdog, but Ryzens are well and truly impressive), and a workable graphics card (because you never know...) and my first ever SSD, and 32GB memory (a decent whack of memory - not as decent as 64GB, but 64GB at today's prices is pure madness).

The main thrill of the Ryzen is 8 cores, 16 threads. Overkill? Maybe. The dream is me doing dev work on the machine, a couple of VMs running, with the eldest logged in remotely and playing MineCraft, without me even noticing.

Oh, and a case with a glass panel, so that my sons (of course), can see the LEDs from the motherboard and CPU. I don't remember those from 11 years ago.