I've always appreciated support from you, my incredible fans, but this week made me appreciate it all the more.
(Side note: I now have a Discord server for announcements regarding all of my projects, getting help and suggesting additions!)
To give you some context:
Over the last few months, I've been having some stability issues with my applications. I initially blamed it on buggy software, but last Friday I decided to perform a hardware evaluation on my memory as a sanity check, and... it failed. I suspected I would probably have to replace my RAM, which would suck in the middle of the RAMpocalypse, but not terrible since I would only need DDR4.
Unfortunately, after doing some more digging, I found that it was actually a power delivery issue, likely only a relatively inexpensive power supply replacement. I ordered a Seasonic CORE 650 Watt PSU on Amazon and waited for it to be delivered Monday. After swapping it out, everything seemed fine, the memory evalution passed, and my PC worked fine for a couple of days.
And then I started having crashes again. So I ran Memtest86+ again, and... FAIL. I check voltages in the UEFI, off target again. (To be specific, the tolerance is plus or minus 5% of the expected voltage for each power rail, and my 3.3 volt rail was at 2v, 5v rail at 3v. Not ideal.)
In most cases, this would be a quick swap of the motherboard, but very unfortunatly for me, I had an Intel i7 11th gen (2021), and since Intel likes to change the socket every generation or two, there were no replacement motherboards to be found. (It also wouldn't help if my RAM was also damaged by the power problems) And since the transition to DDR5 happened in the time since I got my PC in early 2022, I would have to buy not only a new motherboard, but also a CPU, and worst of all, new DDR5 RAM.
Fortunately, I don't live terribly far from a Micro Center, so I looked at the deals they had for 3 in 1 combos, and was able to get a pretty good deal on the components. In total, I ended up paying $903.85 to get:
The combo deal - $649.99 for:
Gigabyte B650 Gaming X AX V2 Motherboard - $141.61
AMD Ryzen 7 9700X - $121.01
Corsair VENGEANCE RGB 32GB DDR5 Memory - $387.37
+ Bent Pin Protection - $24.99 (Ended up not being necessary, but the Customer Service guy had me at not paying $150 again for a new board if I messed up, since this was my first time installing a CPU myself)
Plus the new CPU cooler (since my old one didn't fit AM5):
Thermalright Aqua Elite 240 V3 AIO CPU Cooler - $59.99
And the power supply from Amazon:
Seasonic CORE GX 650W Power Supply - $108.24
(Note: I am not afflilated any of these brands)
The RAM was the hardest, because I need 32GB for proper UE5 C++ development, and I'd have a lot of trouble if I tried to work with only 16GB. 390 dollars sounds bad and felt bad for what 32GB should be worth, but compared to the list price of $599.99, I think I got a really good deal with that bundle at Micro Center.
Thank YOU for making this possible!
Without your support, I almost certainly wouldn't have been able to afford this, and I would've been stuck without a workstation for much longer than a week. Or, I would have had to downscale and try to work with half the RAM and less CPU cores, which would have made development significantly more difficult for me.
I was able to cover over half of the bill with the between all the money you guys have collectively donated over the past year and a half, and referrals from my partnership with BisectHosting, so you all really made a difference. From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU to everyone who has supported me throughout this journey.
Reminder that if you want to have a server to play with friends, you can get 25% off when you use code SPACEGAMEDEV and my referral link: https://bisecthosting.com/spacegamedev, and I get recurring commisions each month from your rent, which also helps me cover unforeseen expenses like this that impede my modding work.
Here's what my workstation looks like now:
And I'm not stopping here.
There's still a lot I want to work on, and next on the list is the Coffee Cup Cup, coming (hopefully) this August, that I'm helping develop the technical systems for.
And as always, if you have any suggestions or need help, just drop by my Discord server and say hi, I'm open to ideas and happy to help out!
You can join here: https://spacegamedev.com/discord/ (Reccuring VIPs even get exclusive access to a private channel with other VIPs and myself!)
God bless you, Друп мой (My friend)!
"And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose." - Romans 8:28, ESV