Fair warning: I hardly mention puppets at all in this one.
For various reasons I often don’t sleep well Monday nights and last night was no exception. Extra stuff on my mind.
Last year I decided it was time for another round of PC upgrades after not getting any new PC hardware since 2018. Being a gear head, that was fairly unusual. Considering my age and budget, this may very well be one of the last times I do this, so I went big. Got a custom gaming PC built from parts I picked and it was all good. In the meantime, I caught the building bug myself and decided to home-build a compact PC for my office.
So far both have been fine, but last week it became clear that the water cooling pump in the big expensive gaming rig was having issues, beginning with an annoying whine. I put it down to just fan cruft and manually throttled it until I could open it up for a clean, but that resulted, yesterday, in the CPU overheating when doing nothing more than playing some audio. Removing the manual throttle and letting the fan run at full, the CPU was still idling at 90 degrees Celsius. That’s too hot. Likely culprit is something wrong with the AIO cooler, which mercifully isn’t a terribly expensive fix if I just replace it with air cooling.
(note, the PC in today’s logo isn’t the big expensive rig, it’s the little home-built one I use in the office and I love it. I call it The Fishtank for obvious reasons)
The problem is this is the PC that runs the entire build stream setup. If you’ve ever joined us on a build stream (Wednesdays 11am ET on Twitch and YouTube) you know that with 6 different cameras and several layouts, transitions and various bits of resource-hungry hardware, it’s not a simple setup. Even importing/exporting settings, swapping it to another machine is no easy task and would require hours of work. As there’s a stream tomorrow and I still have puppet building to do today, that’s not happening.
So tomorrow is Ride or Die for the gaming rig. The pump isn’t totally dead so I’m going to open the case, aim a fan into it and hope it doesn’t power down during the stream. If you’re watching and the stream suddenly goes down, you’ll know what happened.
I have a replacement cooler on the way but this whole incident has me rethinking my entire strategy. We will dig into this in detail on the upcoming episode of Pixels and Puppets, but for me at least, that age of “more power” PC rigs is over. Now I want efficiency, stability and reliability. That are ways to achieve that, and it starts with not paying absurd amounts of money.
A lot to face today. Time for coffee.