Increasingly, I’ve been turning my mind to what will come after Rimuru; a machine that was originally built in 2021 using the COVID-19 stimulus as its foundation and the same general design of its predecessor, Centauri. Since then, it has undergone 6 refits between Rimuru experiencing a motherboard failure in addition to ordinary tech updates.
Simply put, the status quo for the last few years has been that only one slot on the board is still functional, and the intention was that there would be no third motherboard if it fails. Combined with what is now a 5-year-old Core i7, the single slot of RAM has proven to be the key bottleneck. Ironically, getting Oblivion: Remastered to run was more an exercise in getting the GPU load to a point where the CPU isn’t pegging out.
It’s also been a downside that between the old CPU being well loaded and the Big-Assed-GPU both cranked up practically turn the machine into a space heater. I decided the machine to handle sustained load while keeping system thermals under control. The catch-22 of course, is I can easily find myself sitting in a room that climbs towards +10 degrees after a long spell of gaming, like playing Silent Hill f over the weekend.
Following Maleficent, I considered swapping the GPU and NVMe drive over to Zeta, and converting it from a file and virtual machine server over to Rimuru’s successor. That actually was how Centauri had become my previous desktop. Of course, breaking down and cracking the case revealed roughly what expected to be with that plan: I could fit the PSU and the cooling system, or I could fit the GPU. Zeta’s PSU would be able to handle ‘technically’ fitting and powering Rimuru’s RTX 4070 Ti, but would require removing the liquid cooling system to accommodate the PSU. So, that plan failed.
One of my long-term plans over the past lustrum or so has been that Rimuru would likely be my last conventional “Desktop PC.” I’ve never really been a believer in gaming laptops, but it here we are.
Christened Ranga, since its job is to blow Rimuru away. Amusingly, using Oblivion: Remastered as a point of reference it delivers similar performance but the opposite bottleneck. Rather than being CPU bound, Ranga is GPU bound, but still firmly lands in the realm of pick your frame rate. Closer to 30 at Ultra/4K or closer to 60 at Medium/4K, and a pretty slick 40s-50s at High/4K.
A bit of rewiring all the things, and my dock is now situated underneath the monitor rather than within a passive Thunderbolt 3 cable length of the desktop. Somehow, the part that bothers me about this arrangement is that a 2 meter long active Thunderbolt 5 cable cost about the same as my shorter TB3/TB4 cables did, while being rated for 80 Gbps/240W, far higher than my dock can handle. On the flip side, for cooling purposes a small stand was necessary to ensure proper ventilation.
In tests so far, I’m finding that the Zephyrus G14 is a sufficient match. Its RTX 5070 Ti mobile just can’t match the horsepower of the RTX 4070 Ti desktop, but it comes close enough that no loner being bottlenecked on the Core i7-10700K and single slot resolve that pickle. It’s Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 both represent a major generational leap in performance, and while the RAM remains comparable, it isn’t so limited: so yay for being back to dual channel memory!
As an added benefit, when putting Shion in place to be my primary computer, I no longer have the problem of not being able to see where the fuck the port is, since it’s no longer facing the wall. I kind of liked having my laptop off to the side as previous, but the occasions where I actually use my laptop as a notebook PC make it grumble some to reconnect. More so than swapping between TB cables at the dock. Now? It’s simply swap laptops in the stand, a single cable running to the dock.
Another benefit is proving to be the heating. The Zephyrus G14 is very rapid to crank its fans into high-gear when gaming, to the point that one might want noise canceling headphones rather than speakers for some content. But it doesn’t raise the room’s ambient temperature as drastically as my desktop, and frankly, the late generation MacBook Pro 16s had louder fans :-P.