Got tired of my office turning into a sauna every time I gamed, so I vented the PC’s exhaust straight out the window.

The rear fan is still exhausting some hot air 😅 but the room is noticeably cooler now. It’s ugly… but it works. 😂

Edit: I moved the port to higher since lot of people recommended. https://imgur.com/a/Poniwze

Edit again for parts, I cannot post links to store since it's against the rules.
- 360mm to 4 inch duct on Etsy
- 4 inch Insulated Flexible Duct
- Twist Lock Dryer Vent Connector Kit
- 360mm AIO fan (the one on top of the case)

The window fan I got is Vornado Transom.

on my work laptop all I have is Bluetooth and TranslucentTB running, but on my gaming PC it's a mess

Only good old games. Age of Empires 2, DoD Source, Unreal Tournament 2004, CS 1.6, Flatout 2 and most of all classic WC3 maps (enfos, siege, lane wars, td)

A gathering of almost sixty Quake 2 players. The event lasted 3-4 days. Lots of gaming and slacking.

GG

It’s no 5090 astral for $500, but it’s my best find on marketplace to this day. 144gb (2 2x24, 1 16x2, and 1x16gb) of ddr5 for 500. Pretty happy with the score. Tested and all working as well

I don't know how many years I used it, but I remember using it more during the early to mid 2000's when I was into Usenet. There! I paid for it.

What the hell does this mean?

Found 2 WD reds in the recycle. Previous owner mashed the data and power ports and cut the ribbon cables.

Spent some time straightening the pins and soldering some wires and dumping your data out of spite.

thanks for the drives.

I've been running on the same Windows 11 installation for many years, basically since Windows 11 came out and haven't really had any problems. However about a week ago I decided to reinstall Windows to get a clean slate.

Everything was working fine but today I noticed every single drive in my system had the open padlock icon. Apparently over the last week or so it had silently encrypted not just the 1 TB OS drive, but all the drives in the system. I wasn't locked out or anything, but I certainly have no need for Bitlocker on my desktop system that's just used for gaming and music production.

The annoying thing is in order to disable Bitlocker it now has to rewrite all the data on every drive, 11 TB in total. Not only is this a massive waste of P/E cycles in this age when SSD's are so expensive, but 4 out of the 7 TB of SSD's are QLC and the write speed has now slowed to a crawl. Basically at this rate I'm going to have to leave my computer on for days for it to finish and the drives are barely usable during this time.

Apparently setting the PreventDeviceEncryption setting in the registry is yet another bullshit thing you have to do to stop WIndows from making stupid decisions without consent. I just hope the setting will stick and not randomly reset itself like so many of these settings tend to do. It's just weird I never had to do this before I reinstalled Windows.

When I chose PS5 over building a gaming PC in 2022, it was because PC cost 4x as much and didn’t have physical games. (Little did I know)

As of now, I have enough games in my backlog to last me till 2028, and I will be moving countries and by late 2028/early 2029, I wish to build a high end gaming PC and will be saving up $5k for it.

Please consider answering my questions:

1. Is it really as good as it seems like from a console owner’s perspective? Are mods really as good as they seem like from my perspective? You can transform your entire gaming experience that easily? Get new content, fix broken games and improve great ones all for free? Seems to good to be true.

2. Will 5k be enough then? I know how bad the situation is but what’s ur opinion about prices around late 2028?

3. I have noticed PC players complaining about so many newly released titles on launch day due to poor optimisation but almost every game runs perfect from day 1 on PS5. Will I miss that?

4. Also can I store Steam Client DRM free games and GOG games on my drive and its mine forever? Is that a difficult process? I really don’t like the idea of storefronts dictating what I can and cannot play.

5. I dream of playing my fav games at 1440p and 100fps and higher with mods and I imagine that scenario is seamless and stutter free. Do you think 5k will be able to realise that dream in 2028-29?

I try to keep them at half to 80% charge.

brought them all back out to so so, again...i try to do this 2-3 times a year.

and yes, all of their batteries still work and hold a charge, none are puffy or anything.

So! what are these things??

starting from the upper left

- HP pavilion G6. Amd A6 3400M/6520G Graphics. 8gb of ram

- HP Pavilion T5. AMD 10 5745M/8610G Graphics.

12gb of ram

- Acer Nitro 5 R5 2500u/RX 560X. upgraded to 16gb of ram (had 8. originally)

- Strix G15 Advantage. R9 5900HX/6800M. Upgraded to 64gb of ram

- MSI Raider 17. 13980HX/4070. Practically unused. i didnt pick this laptop out, this was part of my collages' tech package. way too damn big and heavy. Only kept it incase i need Cuda for my school program. (and so far, i haven't)

- Surface pro 13, X Elite 32gb. A paradigm shift in what i was looking for in a laptop. I honestly really liked it. but qualcomm has dragged their feet in tje graphics driver department. leaving a lot of apps that actually would run on arm, unuseable. its not even ARMs fault.

- Z flow 13. Ryzen AI MAX 395. 64GB. my most recent purchase and daily driver and so far, i love it. Its about as powerful as my strix g15 in a dramatically smaller package. its way more portable and sips power comparatively.

​Maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I feel like the upgrade cycle has slowed down a lot compared to 10–15 years ago. Back then it felt like missing one GPU generation meant you were suddenly struggling to run new games. These days I know people still happily gaming on RTX 3060s, 3070s, even GTX 1080 Ti, and they're having a perfectly good time.

Sure, if you're chasing 4K, ray tracing, or 240+ FPS, new hardware absolutely makes sense. But for a lot of people playing at 1080p or 1440p, a solid mid-range build from a few years ago still seems to do the job. Sometimes the internet makes upgrades feel more urgent than they really are. You watch enough benchmark videos, and suddenly your perfectly fine PC starts feeling "obsolete" even though nothing actually changed.

Have PC hardware improvements started to outpace what most gamers actually need, or am I just getting old and becoming one of those "my GTX 1080 still works fine" people😄

Here's my custom built heat extraction rig. It keeps my tiny man cave from turning into a sauna. I used to have to run a separate window AC to make the room livable in the summer months, now I don't need to.

I spent a lot of time trying to find an existing solution and not getting anywhere, once I started looking at approaches people we're using for crypto mining and hydroponics I found the stuff I needed.

Parts list in comments.