Last night on the first episode of Rounding Off Infinity – Talking About Games, an audience member asked me how I got to running multiple PCs in the studio / lab. As I’ve been walking back through that history over the last 24 hours, mentality putting together the script to convey that story, it struck me how vanilla building PCs has gotten over the last two decades. In the last few years, the industry hasn’t really given builders much of a reason to open up their cases other than performance gains. But the old days when innovations would allow you to add expanded functionality have pretty much dried up.
The only thing that has really occurred over the last 5 years or so is that we’ve incrementally added additional nVME slots, 1 at a time. In fact, it has been lost in the annals of my memory that one of the bit-checks in my old “will I or won’t I” upgrade algorithm was to ask whether or not the upgrade allowed me to do anything that I couldn’t already do, or was it just a performance bump; did it expand on my PC’s functionality? It hadn’t dawned on me until recently that that question had eroded out of my recapitalization inner monologue b/c there’s been nothing but form-factor and speed changes.
It used to be that, over the years of changing technology, my roadmap had me add a CD-ROM, a CD/R/RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-r/RW, and then finally a BD-ROM, then BD-R/RW, including builds where I had multiple optical drives; I added Zip drives, ORB drives, dual NICs to shotgun my internet connection, SCSI drives, Sound Cards!!!! Ohhhh how audio has gone the way of the dodo…even adding various speaker setups…
now it’s just easier to use a SoundBar…Microsoft used to make the Sidewinder Strategic Commander and other quirky controllers…whereas there’s been very little innovation in the controller space…everyone just uses an XBox Controller or a DualSense, and there hasn’t been an innovative FCS since the Warthog came out in 2010!!!!! I love me some Thrustmaster, but everything they’ve done of late has been derivations off the T16000 design.
All of this has smoothed the plane of build and upgrade decisions to a commodity. Managing upgrades used to be way more complex. We went from PCI for GPUs, to AGP, and back to PCIe which was introduced in 2003 and nary an alt since. And there were times that there were moboards and GPUs that might use 1 of 2 of those interfaces and performance was not always guaranteed to be a slam dunk across the newer, or there were boards with both slots and maybe you needed a 2nd card (back when one card could only drive one monitor). As a PC builder, one is left to say “Is this all that I am? Is there nothing more?” (Kirk, Star Trek the Motion Picture, 1979).
My two conclusions from this wanderlust: I’m about out of the game; I’ve been doing two builds or mods per year for 18 years of time total, from 1999 to now, with a 6 year hiatus in between. And there just aren’t innovations happening in a way that building a PC makes me feel like my Dad in the garage restoring an old car. And two….yeah…you kids who are PC builders have it easy these days.
You would never build a PC today in a Supermicro SC750a case (the one pictured at the top of this post). But there was a time when this was a coveted enclosure. Expensive. Beefy. Able to be stuffed with all manner of computing evil. You would have to sometimes buy non-standard cables that were longer b/c you weren’t guaranteed to be able to make the run from the upper drive bays down to the PATA ports with standard cables.
We Were PC Builders Once… and Young
Rounding Off Infinity 