Posted on Oct 10, 2020 by kingbeowulf
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.