I’m glad I went with AMD for my custom PC and my laptop.

Well, to be fair, I actually bought it to use as a desktop and upgraded it accordingly. Then a few months later I decided to build a Ryzen system. Optiplex got moved to server duty.

I bought an Optiplex 7050 SFF for $100 USD at the start of 2023. Upgraded it to an i7-7700, 32GB RAM, 300W PSU from an XE3 model (stock is 180W), and threw in a spare Nvidia K1200 Quadro for shits and giggles. Runs almost my entire suite of self-hosted applications without a hitch.

Our society is 100% car centered. My kids’ schools are miles away from my house, my job is miles away, and you cannot convince me to ride a bike or walk when it’s over 100°F outside. Fuck that shit. I’m happy to take public transit, but any public transit available to me isn’t feasible because it would take literally 1.5-2 hours to get to work and back each way, which cuts down severely on my family time. And I can’t work from home either due to the nature of my job, which is maintaining the machines that build microchips.