To Everything There Is a Season

It is finally time to say goodbye to the MSI X99S Krait SLI build from 2014. This was my first Intel CPU build since 1999-2000. That winter I built an Athlon64 system with a Gigabyte Geforce 256DDR as more performance than what Intel offered (no 64-bit!) at a much better price.

It was shortly thereafter that I briefly switched to SLAMD64 until Slackware64 was released.

I started out with an Intel i7-5820k and 16 GB DDR4, with a Gigabyte Geforce GTX660 Windforce. Then came the EVGA GTX 1060, followed by an additional 16 GB DDR4 (I deplore empty slots...), 256 GB NVME, and the current Intel i7-6850K. When I added the new CPU I upgraded the passive CPU heatsink and fan with a Thermaltake 240mm dual fan closed loop liquid coolor (Water 3.0 pump).

When Slackware64-current added kernel 5.4.x, I temporarily blacked out and replaced the Nvidia GPU with the

** XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC Ultra III **

Why? Absolutely no idea. As I said, I must have blacked out. This is a massive GPU card and barely fits in the Antec P100 case.

The bonus of a Navi class CPU on kernel 5.4 is that I can now run a full opensource amdgpu/Mesa GPU stack with OpenGL and vulkan hardware 3D accelleration. I can hardly wait to see what this PCI-express 4.0 card can do on the new GIGABYTE X570 AORUS ELITE AMD Ryzen motherboard with PCI-express 4.0

Now I just have to rip out the old Intel guts, and plug in the new AMD guts...and clean out the dust.

Gandalf the Grey is dead.

Long live Gandalf the White!