Progress Report, Hardware Issues, 12/06 - 20 (Patreon)

Hello everyone and welcome to a brief progress report, primarily focused on current on-going issues with my rig.

Long story short, my computer has been growing increasingly noisy and warm over the years and particularly lately began to dip in terms of performance while exponentially becoming louder and warmer. Thus, just this week, I got myself a brand new chassis in the hopes of remedying the fans that sounded more like sawmills than the agents of cool air they're meant to be, meaning to address the heating issue foremost. Barring a few hiccups during installation, which may or may not have included plenty of swearing, the transfer of components went well enough.

I did however quickly realize, and sorrowfully have to admit, that my trusty old 970 has begun to bend like a banana from long-term heat exposure, and will now no longer work for longer than a few minutes before spiking above 90C. I've tried everything in the book, from clocking to custom fan curves, you name it, and it will always eventually culminate into the dangerzone. Though the air that exits the chassis is cool, the GPU itself simply overheats, with its fans seemingly slipping in their internal mechanism with sounds not comfortable to human ears. In other words, it's borked, and in spite of my MacGyver spirit of computer tinkering, I will have to admit defeat and order a new card.

I'm taking this opportunity to research and get a new motherboard while I am at it, as my previous is still stuck in the PCI-E 2.0 tier. It's been a long time coming, but I hope this new material will be able to help up productivity in the end, with significantly shorter render times and the likes.

TLDR:

Graphic card is broken. Getting a new graphic card asap, and maybe motherboard. In the meantime, I will attempt to supply content in the form of pinups, as rendering for longer than a minute will cause emergency shutdown protocols due to overheating. Conversely, I'll have to take up a few more extra shifts at work to cover the immense cost of hardware these days, hotdamn.

Sorry about this hiccup in content delivery, and thanks for understanding. I'll be getting back to form as soon as is humanly possible, and with my chosen retailer getting a bunch of very promising cards tomorrow Saturday, I think downtime will be minimal.

On the plus side, we've received some of Ivan's voice work, with more to come. LotW2 is shaping up to have quite the VA talent :)

Take care of yourselves, and each other! Thank you, as always.
/DH