Over the course of the last few years I’ve moved through a few different systems. My first build has the following specifications, and was built in March of 2009 or so:

• Gigabyte EP43-UD3L Socket 775 Motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200 2.33Ghz
• Corsair TX750W 750W Power Supply
• Corsair XMS2 4x2GB
• BFG Geforce 9800GT 512MB
• Seagate Barracuda 750GB
• Coolermaster Centurion

It was a reliable system overall, though it did give me a few headaches over time such as arbitrarily deciding to not power on randomly every few months, cause me to tear it apart, reseat everything, only to magically start working again. I added a 1.5TB hard drive for extra storage afterwards. I found the 9800GT Ran rather hot. After a month or so I decided to try repasting the GPU and took it apart and managed to do so and get lower temperatures.

Anyway, in Early 2014 I decided to build a new system to replace it, which ended up as the following, which I am using at the moment:

• Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H
• Intel i7 4770k @ 3.5Ghz
• 16GB 1600Mhz Corsair XMS3 DDR3 2x8GB
• ASUS 2GB GTX 770
• 480GB Seagate SSD+4TB WD Red

The HDDs I actually took from a very late upgrade to the former system, which I performed with the full intention of eventually moving the SSD and Storage drive to a new system altogether. I also doubled the RAM since then, so I’m sitting at 32GB as I speak, and I added another 3TB Barracuda drive for redundancy. This system is great. As a result, my old system was sort of shoved off to a corner.

Recently, I bought it a new WD Blue 500GB Drive, and decided to give the Windows 10 Preview a whirl on that older system. To my surprise I found the Geforce 9800GT was running ridiculously warm- we’re talking nearly 100 degrees sitting at the desktop with the fan whirring away at 100%. I tried repasting the GPU but got no luck. I was considering even buying a cheaper, modern Graphics card to replace it, but then decided to give it a full cleanup, and took everything apart on the card. I discovered that the aluminum slits it used to route airflow were absolutely clogged with dust- something impossible to see from outside the card without taking it apart, so I cleaned out all the dust I found.

After doing so, repasting the GPU again (since I removed the heatsink, after all) and after powering it up I now find that it idles at around 45(c) and tends to stay below 80 even under heavy load with programs like furmark.

What was my purpose? A second system. If it worked for me until I built this system, I should be able to find something useful for it to do. Currently my thought is to use it for Windows 10 testing as well as experimenting with new Visual Studio Preview releases. It also has the advantage of, like my laptop, having a standard 96dpi display, which is an advantage only because of the winforms work I do, as Windows Forms apparently saves the DPI on the development machine which has caused several of our applications to mess up if I happened to be the one who built them. Effectively, though, I just got annoyed with seeing a rather good system just sit in the corner of my room doing nothing.