Work Station Upgrade pt.2 - New PC

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, ROG Strix GeForce RTX 2080 Ti OC, ROG Cooler, 16GB RAM, Cooler Master MasterBox NR200 case

We were supposed to go into hybrid the week of Thanksgiving. Instead, OC went back into the purple tier which meant that for schools that did not go in person yet, they were not allowed to transition to in person until the county goes back into red for two full weeks. Knowing that the numbers weren’t good and were going up and up, I figured that the earliest we would go back was late January, but realistically, as I’m writing this now in mid-January, it’s probably not going to happen until late February or March.

Knowing that I would be full time distance teaching, I went to work and decided that I wanted to upgrade my five year old PC. During Black Friday, I tried to look for some deals and barely found anything. I tried going to Micro Center, but when I got there, the line was wrapped around the building. I started looking into prebuilts and even though I hated the idea, it was the only way I would get a decent graphics card. As I was driving home, I texted my old friend who knew a guy. I texted that guy and he had a prebuilt that had great specs.

We negotiated slightly, but not really - the price he was offering was already better than I expected. It was in a small form factor Cooler Master case with an AMD Ryzen 7 3700x and a 2080Ti liquid cooled with 16GB of ram and a 500GB m.2 drive. More specific specs can be found here and I just added a TB of storage for games and such. Here's a link to the parts list but ignore the prices because everything is marked up.

In terms of teaching, I’ve changed a few things. Instead of putting my camera directly through to Zoom, I OBS which is a piece of streaming software. That way I can create different scenes and streamline transitions. Paired with my Stream Deck (I’ll save that for the next part in this series), I can go from just a face cam to showing my iPad with face in the corner or a Chrome window with me in the corner. I can add neat little transition animations and animated overlays like Pikachu saying “Let’s go!”. I know I haven’t tapped the full potential of OBS or the Stream Deck, but it’s still a vast improvement over what I was doing before. I know it might seem like overkill and it kind of is.

I could totally do my job with the Macbook Air my district so generously provided, but I do enjoy the tech and the little extra things do keep the kids a little more engaged I’d like to think. And if they’re not paying attention, I can always run Voicemod and change my voice to a robot or sound like Corpse. Or turn on my soundboard and play an airhorn. And of course at the end of the day when I want to wind down, I can run my favorite FPS (I’m back to liking CS:GO and Valorant) and turn up the graphics to Ultra and still have a high frame rate. Overall the best purchase of the year for me.