FrankenDell Part II

It’s hard to believe I did this four years ago – but I previously posted about my desktop photo editing rig that I built using the gutted Dell XPS desktop that I inherited from my father with parts missing and the like.

It’s a good time for an update.

Buying cheap SSDs may not have been the best idea – one of them did die and is now replaced by a larger mechanical hard drive just to store files, with all the software being loaded on the still good SSD.

Also, 8 gigabytes of RAM just wasn’t doing well. I now have it maxed out at 32GB.

But, the most significant upgrade went in this weekend. It’s something that I’ve never had before. Building computers back in the 1990’s, I always went for the cheapest video card I could find. That’s the one part of the budget where I always cut corners. When the 2000’s came and they started building the video in to the system boards, I just never worried about graphics cards. I played games on consoles. As long as the Playstation was available, I never cared about computer gaming. For only $90, I was able to find an AMD Radeon 580 card with 8GB of RAM on it. It came out in 2017 so this isn’t exactly cutting edge, but it gives capabilities that I’ve never seen before.

It was bigger than I expected, as can be seen here, quite large. Shockingly (no pun intended), it draws 185 watts of power.

Fortunately, when I replaced the power supply with the on-sale “gamer power supply” in 2021, it was 600 watts and it had the proper connectors to supply power to this silicon monstrosity.

As can be seen here, it just barely fit. Anything newer or more expensive probably would not have.

Counter Strike 2, American Truck Simulator, and all of those modern type games now work! How does this change my photo editing workflow? I have Debian Linux with my film scanner, and I’ll post about that soon!