Every three or four years I get the urge to build a PC. Most of the time, the urge passes and I move on to other ideas/projects/what have you.

This time, I built the dang thing!

Component-wise, the most interesting part is probably the GPU– I was able to get my hands on an Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage!) and it’s spent the last two weeks sitting in my office, unloved. Last night, I trekked down to Microcenter to buy the rest of the computer and, after some drama (it took me a while to figure out where all the screws were, how to attach the CPU cooler, and that the motherboard wanted the 8 pin OR 8+4 power connection, but not BOTH), I have a nicely specced little PC next to my desk.

By little, I mean about the size of a mini-fridge. A “mid tower” is still pretty huge.

Battlemage support in Linux still has a ways to go. I decided to start with Fedora Rawhide, so I can get any improvements soon after they land in the kernel.

So far, I’ve been able to play some games that were unusable or pretty rough on my laptop (a circa 2016 Lenovo Carbon X1), and Godot is humming along nicely. The Abandoned Spaceship Demo was really jerky on the laptop, but runs on the new box like it’s no big deal.