Architectural Diagrams, PC Cleaning, and Hardware Upgrades

Today was a challenging day for focus, largely due to feeling quite drained and tired. I spent most of my time trying to make sense of complex architectural diagrams for Catacloud and the job procesing pipelines. The sheer number of moving parts made it difficult to concentrate. My approach has been to break down the work into smaller, independent implementation pieces, which allows me to think about them in isolation while maintaining a high-level overview. This compartmentalization, defined by specific events and their business logic, helps manage the complexity, especially in my current mental state.

PC Maintenance and Hardware Upgrades

I also dedicated time to my desktop computer, which was long overdue for a thorough cleaning. It was astonishingly full of dust. The stock AMD cooling block on the CPU was so caked with dust that you couldn't even see the radiator fins underneath. This likely stemmed from not having proper dust filters and only a single exhaust fan, causing air to be pulled in from the top ventilation grid, which has no dust filter. I hope to clean the cooling block properly, but if it's beyond salvaging, I might need to replace it or even buy a new one.

I'm also dealing with the challenge of fitting a much larger graphics card (AMD RX 7900 XTX) into my mITX board case. I received a new 1000-watt power supply today to replace my 750-watt unit, as the new graphics card is very power-hungry. I'm considering selling my older graphics card and power supply before they lose more value. The cables also need a thorough cleaning as they are covered in dust.

My current CPU, an AMD Ryzen with 8 cores and 16 threads, paired with 32 GB of DDR4 RAM at 3600 MHz, has been sufficient for my needs. For now, this setup will remain. In the future, I might need to upgrade the motherboard, which could lead to a cascading upgrade of the CPU and memory sticks. I'm not sure if my current CPU socket is compatible with Threadripper, but I could potentially upgrade the motherboard and memory while keeping the same CPU for a while, perhaps with an external water-cooling system if needed.

The new graphics card I acquired seems to have some known issues, particularly with cooling and power efficiency. I'm hopeful these won't lead to frequent crashes. My primary use for this system won't involve long gaming sessions, but rather intensive bursts of usage, so we'll see how it performs. I really hope I don't have to purchase any more components for this setup.