All built, starting the break-in period. (Patreon)

Messy messy messy. Windows REALLY doesn't like it when the entire computer around it suddenly changes. In this case, crashing, rebooting, slow painful pain.

I'm going through and cleaning out anything that it's tripping up on and tweaking things here and there where needed. It's going to need quite a bit of it, but it's getting there; I probably should've done a clean install of Windows, but that's probably more trouble, as I'd have to migrate a whole huge heap of things in the process.

ANYWAY, I did jump on Blender for a bit and it seems like the computer's upgrade did exactly what I thought it would do: sped up and improved every part of Blender minus the actual render times themselves. Faster physics, less things choking up the UI, snappier boot and load times, etc. Definitely makes Blender a large chunk less painful to use.
I'm tinkering a bit with GPU+CPU rendering, too, if you've heard of that.

TL;DR: rocky start, but things are going smoother now, currently eyeing a USB hub and MAYBE a small SSD. The next big upgrade will be a new graphics card, which will be the big workhorse of the build, but I'm not rushing that one.