Phase Three
A fresh start for this project, AM3 CPUs were kinda terrible for future upgrades, but then Ryzen happened and things became a lot better very quickly for AMD
Lockdown hits
Covid-19 was all the rage in the UK by summer 2020 and it was absolutely beautiful for the first time in my life. It was a bit of a struggle to adapt to the change but I didn’t find it too bad. That’s not to say that many people did struggle with the lockdowns, I just dound it a nice experience. Everything was done remotely and there was much less pressure to see people all the time.
Anyways, I took some of this time to redo my entire computer project that I had properly started six years earlier in 2014, ditching the AM3 lineup of CPUs and going for a whole new system. At this point, it’s definitely not the same computer as it was once before - the original computer sits in my attic now. Here’s the parts list I decided to go for:
- Motherboard: Aorus X570 MASTER
- CPU: Ryzen 9 3900X
- SSD: Samsung 970 Pro MVNe M.2
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB (16GB) 3600
- PSU: Corsair TX850M semi-modular
- Case: Corsair Obsidian Series 750D
Only thing that’s the same is the storage drives that I’ve brought over from the previous computer and the 1060 as well. This build was expensive, but it was brilliant. I’ve stuck with some distro of Linux for this long so I’ve just kept with it. I distro-hopped for a bit before settling with Kubuntu and carrying on as usual. The laptop I got at the start of 6th form now had a battery in very poor health that I could not replace easilly on my own, so I transferred all of the data from it to my computer and just carried on from there.
There’s no changes to the computer for a good while, except maybe adding in one of the older GPUs from time-to-time for some local multi-seat multiplayer. But now I was focusing on finishing off 6th form, starting my university degree (a few times), and working on getting my own house
Hedgehog Game Program
In summer 2023, after I got my own house and started my degree for the third time, 21-year-old me decided to get some new games on Steam. One of those was Sonic Frontiers, just to give it a go. While I did enjoy the game, I had some problems with it. There was some screen tearing issue that I could not make go away, no matter how many in-game options and Nvidia options I changed. And as I was enjoying the game I wanted to get the best experience I could as simply as I could. Naturally for me, it was anything but simple.
So I decided to give Windows another go but while retaining the ability to use Linux. This could be acomplished with a dual boot just like last time. But that’s definitely not where I’m going this time, I wanted to use both at the same time. I also wanted to build upon the multi-seat gaming setup I tried last time. Enter Proxmox!
Virtual machines time
If you’ve used virtual machines, unless you’re a system administrator or work with virtual machines by trade, chances are you’ve used them in something like Virtualbox or Windows Virtual PC years ago jsut to run an old program or game. But the performance of those are usually poor. At least, the graphical performance is. But passing through a GPU to the virtual machine ususally results in near-native performance.
So, while installing Proxmox to a differeent partition, I set up a new virtual machine, while passing through the original storage partitions that my computer used, and my GPU, and it seemed to work nicely. I did need to make some tweaks, such as turning off memory balooning, which seemed to cause some significant performance issues for some reason on a Linux guest, but otherwise it was grand.
Now when setting up the Windows virtual machine, I wanted to make sure that it would not consider itself a virtual machine