One of the more momentous purchases of my life proved to be a computer I built when I was a couple weeks shy of 17 years old. Since then, I've built two more computers - each of them built almost exactly five years from the previous one. Though my income has changed since I was 17, the amount I paid for each one stayed relatively constant, making performance comparisons perhaps more convenient.

My first computer

On my first computer, I learned how to program, working through the incomparable Learn to program with C# by John Smiley. I also made forays into game programming, struggled to cobble together some digital art with GIMP using a trackball, and went on more than one manic content creating frenzy including writing a screenplay for a physics class movie and cutting local news footage into a strange cathartic jab at high school. I did 3 years of college school work on this computer and played countless hours of Heroes of Newerth - more, I'm sure, than the combined number devoted to higher learning.

My second computer

My second computer carried me through the finish line of university (a remarkably unacademic period of my life compared to my first three) and was often otherwise relegated to gaming. If memory serves I clocked more hours of Overwatch onto it than HoN. My frustrations with Windows had gotten to a point where I did most productive work on my simultaneously owned laptops. They apparently did not, however, overcome my desire to play Overwatch, which as I recall was the primary reason for continuing on with Windows over Linux. There were brief stints during which I had only Linux installed, but a BIOS bug tended to hard lockup my computer in Linux, and by the time I had patched my BIOS, I had lost motivation to give it another try. It was my last computer to include a CD/DVD drive, which I used to rip a pitiful collection of FLAC files consisting of Pendulum music and a scant few other records.

My third computer

Finally, my third computer, on which I am currently typing this post (from within a VM B-] ) is less than a year old, and it's story is still unfolding. It's a magnificently fast machine, and I've never seen it approach its limits under any workload. It runs Debian Linux, finally kicking Windows to the long-deserved curb, which has been the source of no small number of its own headaches culminating in fresh reinstallations of the OS, but thus far I am managing. The many botched installations have sensitized me to the benefit of having an easy new computer setup process. After weighing some options, I decided to try accomplishing this task via NixOS, which I am trialling on the aforementioned VM. With a mature enough configuration devised in this VM, I'm hoping to be able to use it across all future computers, assuming of course that the Nix project carries on long enough. My gaming drug of choice has thus far been DotA 2, a game I long despised for stealing away the HoN fanbase, but which happily runs on Linux via Flatpak.

Performance comparison

The following is a spec comparison of the three computers I've owned, in descending order from least to most recently built.
CPU RAM Durable storage GPU Monitor CPUBench GPUBench Disk Read/Write speed
AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition 4GB DDR2 800MHz WD 1TB 7200RPM HDD Nvidia GTX 260 Core 216 Samsung T220HD Widescreen 3589 1136 145MB/s / 138MB/s (tested)
Intel Core-i5 4570 8GB DDR3 1600MHz Samsung 500GB SSD Nvidia GTX 760 (Superclocked) Asus MX239H (x2) 7156 4938 540MB/s / 520MB/s
Intel Core-i5 9400 32GB DDR4 3000MHz Samsung 512GB 970 Pro Nvidia RTX 2060 Dell U3419w 11933 12851 3500MB/s / 2700MB/s

Benchmarks for CPU and GPU are courtesy of passmark. I could not find exact benchmarks for my particular GPUs for the first and second computers (since I bought higher end cards within the line they would likely score a little better), but the true scores would likely be in the same ballpark. Disk read and write benchmarks are quotes of sequential read/write speed.

Some fun observations about these builds through the ages are that:
  • The CPU benchmarks roughly doubled, while the GPU benchmarks more nearly tripled.
  • Storage technology is bonkers now. HDDs are firmly relics of the past (they would do even worse in non-sequential read/write speed comparisons)
  • The only company I seem to have brand loyalty to is Nvidia (and maybe Samsung comparing across product lines)
  • Each subsequent build used a newer generation of RAM
  • By my third build I was fed up with running out of RAM
  • I can now get two-monitor real estate from a single monitor
It's very apparent that performance improves dramatically within five years, but up to the moment of their replacement each of my computers have been perfectly usable. I'm hoping to fill this generation's computer with as many fun memories and creative artifacts as its forebearers.