Unintentional Computer Upgrade

I used to rock an Intel core i3-8750K with a Gigabyte Aorus Z370 Gaming 5 motherboard. I had full intentions of upgrading my PC recently but when repairing the heated seats in my car was going to cost me $600, (which is roughly what the upgrade would have cost including a new case), I decided that a warm toosh for winter was more important.

Then my computer had other ideas. Without going into too much grisly detail, my NVME m.2 (SSD) decided it didn't like Windows anymore, was spitting out BSODs, and finally tossed a boot error that I couldn't even fix with a format/fresh install of Windows. Buying another NVME drive did not help, as all it did was throw me into a Recovery screen or boot with a black screen of nothing. The errors were so bizarre that after two frustrating days of trying to fix it, I figured something must be wrong with my motherboard and I needed to pony up to upgrade my computer now instead of later. Just to make sure I was dotting my i's and crossing my t's, Patrick and I took the whole system apart and looked at the motherboard with a flashlight for any burns, scrapes or leaks. Nothing; it looked pristine. So, I ordered a new motherboard and CPU.

I was not at all excited for this. The unexpected nature of this upgrade dulled my enthusiasm due to having paid $620 for heated seats and then another $400 for my upgrade when I wasn't ready for it. And to make matters even more annoying, while I was waiting for my upgrade to arrive, I decided to "test bench" my system, which basically means I put it together outside of my case, with an old laptop HDD to see if it was the NVME slots that were causing the problem.

And it booted up. I was floored. And to add icing to this bitter cake, I unplugged the HDD, put the new NVME back in, and it booted up just fine, again.

Wut.

So now I had a system that was once again running smoothly for no discernible reason, and I just spent $400 I didn't have on a new one. But the problem is that I don't know what to do with this one, now. It seems to be unreliable. I wouldn't even want to give it to anyone for free as a primary machine because of those weird issues.

I also miss my RGB. I switched over to a Ryzen 5 3600 with an Asus X570 wifi motherboard (I had a choice between Gigabyte and Asus in my budget and seeing as how Gigabyte soured me with these weird issues, I went for Asus) and not only do the X570 motherboards not have flashy RGB like my old board did (I mean, look at the glow on that thing!) Asus's "aura sync" software is buggy beyond usable and what RGB it does have either doesn't work or can't be controlled. Yeah, it's a first world problem but dammit.

On the plus side, after receiving my new supplies, I was able to set up both NVME drives in a Raid 0 just because I could (so two, 250gb drives now become one blazing fast 500gb drive), and I decided to run some tests on my new CPU, which I bought specifically for rendering/conversion over gaming. So rendering an episode of Good Eats: Reloaded (my original test here - which also explains what m.2 and NVME is) was 7 minutes faster. And converting a batch of RAW files (620 - for a time lapse) took only 30-45 minutes. On my old machine, a batch of 1200 files took 6 hours to complete, and I couldn't even use my computer at the time because it was using every available resource. So yes, besides the lack of RGB my new system is pretty bomb and I am really happy with it. I just wish I didn't have to go into debt to make it happen!