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I've been holding back on upgrading my PC for a while now, Windows 10 has been out for a while, but I've held off on it, when I built my current computer, all the way back in 2010\2011, I had intended to stay with Windows 7 until it ran out of support, in 2020.

But it seems now days it's not at all possible to buy a new CPU that supports Windows 7 out of the box, at least without a bit of hacking.

I've also got the added problem of being stuck with 8GB of ram due to my motherboards age, whereas I'm finding most games now days are expecting at least 16GB.

I've found the whole process of upgrading to be mentally exhausting.

I've been fortunate enough to experience Windows 10 at work, and I haven't been too impressed with it to be honest, and I've got to sit back and watch the chaos caused by the free upgrade, on one hand I was never a fan of Windows 8\8.1 so I see reason to move forward with Windows 10 if you are on that platform, I did this with my laptop when Windows 10 first became available.

I've experienced some rather vulgar criticism towards my indecisiveness and lack of want to upgrade to Windows 10 and I feel like I have good reason, for the most part the argument has been purely from a security perspective, but as far as I'm aware Windows 7 is still supported and offers everything I need.

There is always the option of moving to Linux, but I haven't crossed that bridge just yet.

Moving on, as to why I have decided to just sidestep the issue of upgrading entirely, this semester I'm taking a Game Development course and so I need to run the Unity 2018.2 game engine, among other software such as Android Studio.

I won't make my feelings towards Unity known in this post, but the short of it, is that I don't quite trust the company, and I don't feel like they have the consumers best interest in mind. - I've also spent a significant amount of time with other game engines such as Ogre3D and the Irrlicht Engine, on top of that, the Quake Engine has been open source for quite a while now, and my ever-favourite Build Engine (via the eDuke32 source port), but this semester I want to be a bit more creative than just another drab first person shooter. - I have, also experimented with building my own small Engine, and then there is SDL, Unity feels like a one size fits all kind of tool, yes creative things have been made with it, but it's always felt a bit cut and paste. - I think for myself I have always wanted to go down the hard-core path.

I'm going to let the requirements for the course win for this one. - I may have strong feelings against unity, but I'm just going to put those aside for now and build a second computer for it to run on, like a sandbox. - that way I don't end up polluting my main desktop environment, and I can blow the machine away at the end.

Getting to the PC specs:

I'm determined to not spend any money, but I picked up another Samsung 850 Evo 250GD SSD for cheap,

My brother had some spare hardware that I could borrow, so I got an MSI H97M-G43 with a Core i5 4460 and 32GB of trident X (not even sure what the clock speed is),

My girlfriend recently upgraded her GPU to a 1070 TI, so I was given her EVGA GTX 970 GPU that I can use in the meantime.

For the parts I did buy:

Case: Corsair Obsidian 750D Black Airflow Edition ATX Case, Window

Power supply: Corsair HX850i 850W Power Supply

CPU Cooler: NZXT Kraken X62 Liquid CPU Cooler (With AM4 Bracket)

Fan Controller: Silverstone CPF04 1-to-8 PWM Fan Hub

Card Reader: SilverStone FP56 Black 5.25" Multi-Card Reader

Time for a late-night ghetto build!

I also scored a 500GB HDD and a USB wireless dongle from a Telstra T-Box rebranded NetGem rubbish. These are going into my ghetto gaming pc! FUCK YEAH, Scrapyard warz!

Update: In other news, that feel when your HDD is over 10 years old, and you never once backed it up... 🤣🔫

At least the Game design doc is now done! Time to enjoy what's left of my short weekend! 🙂