Insults to injuries:

When you're about to use your desktop to login, load a slow ass webpage, to go edit something the app doesn't offer, and you're next thought is "Wait, my iPad's browser is still faster than this thing."


My desktop mostly remains because it does one thing very well: play Direct3D games. Because while its era of Core i5 is getting quite long in the toofers: it still can throw three pounds of GTX at problems my other machines can't.

Actually, based on the few games that really stress the shit out of my desktop: I'm inclined to think the old Core i5-3570K is the real bottleneck. That is to say when games like Final Fantasy XV or Resident Evil 7 get a spike o lagocity, it coincides with the processor load looking like a tomahawk cruise missile hit in the family jewels.

That said: the machine has held up very well. Beyond those two titles: it hasn't really blushed in the face of melting as far as 1080p gaming goes.

Expected decommissioning date has long since come and gone versus how long I had designed Centauri to service my computing needs. It's mostly been economics, and the lack of need to retire it that the machine has endured. Which is why the last overhaul was migrating from the very first SSD that I ever bought to a considerable larger one.

The obvious catch to the age is, for tasks like web browser page load times, my iPad basically smokes my desktop :/. But the fruity thing can't drive my GTX 780, nor will it ever natively run the games that dominate my desktop's reason for existence.

Last time that I researched options for the longer term: it pretty much boiled down to two issues. The older Core i7 models that fit my motherboard aren't easy to come by for a good price unless they're second hand. Versus new: may as well buy a modern Core i5, but then it is in for a penny, in for a pound of ram. Needless to say, I don't invision Centauri's next significant hardware refit to be for quite a while.

Given how well Centauri has aged, and the odds that its GTX will need to retire by the time Centauri does, I rather wonder if whatever comes next in hardware will just be a laptop with a Thunderbolt eGPU dock or whatever nVidia equipped laptops look like by then. For now, I'm just happy the machine hasn't died in a puff of smoke despite all the years of hard work, hehe. It remains one of the best computers that I've ever owned.