I have been a computer geek since Dad brought our very first PC home in 1986, a Leading Edge Model D. It was an impressive unit, featuring a 4.77MHz 8088 processor, a 5.25" floppy drive and a 30MB hard drive (OMG, 30MB!!!), 640K RAM, a 2400 baud modem, and dual monitors, one amber monochrome and the other a 4-color CGA. It served me well in high school, but it served me much more significantly in establishing a career path. That first PC is where I cut teeth. That experience as well as my next two PCs, one that we bought used, and the next that I built from scratch with the help of a local Value Added Reseller (VAR) served as a springboard to 17 years in IT. Seventeen years is a long time to spend absolutely obsessed with computers, with 8-12 hours per day working, then another 4-6 hours playing around with the hardware or gaming. Every day. Long story short, I burned out. I bailed on IT and went to school to retrain as a professional chef - something that I had always said that I wanted to do if I ever left IT. I was already neck deep into my new career, and totally digging it, having absolutely no remorse about leaving IT nor interest in returning to IT. Fast forward to around 2009. My latest store-bought PC was pathetic. So, I asked my best friend (who was still in IT and up to speed with PC technology) to help me spec out a new system that I would build myself - I wanted a 10-year system. I planned on a GPU upgrade around the 5-year mark, and possibly replacing a dead power supply somewhere in that 10-year timeframe, but it was a big build on all fronts: CPU, liquid cooling, RAM, storage, case cooling all forward looking for longevity and eventual overclocking. I now had a sweet system moving forward and I could now focus entirely on my new career. Fast forward, again. My 10-year build had performed flawlessly for 9 years, but it was getting long in the tooth. Time to try overclocking the GPU since that was the bottleneck. A few quick tweaks and I managed a 30% improvement in FPS - ooohh, shiny. Next, I overclocked my original processor to great effect, then found the fastest processor my motherboard would support on eBay, and overclocked the snot out of that one, too. However, this was all on a 9-year-old motherboard that didn't support an NVMe boot drive via any means, so it was time for a proper upgrade. And, just like that, my geek gene reasserted itself. AMD Ryzen. What is with Ryzen. The Ryzen 7 2700x seems to be getting great reviews, and one can overclock all of them without being subjected to the Intel K and Z taxes. I settled in on an RGB blinged-out high-end air-cooled rig, with the only expenses spared being my old PSU and GPU (with that shiny overclock). My geek gene was not sated, so I built an HTPC using a Ryzen 5 2400g and got my overclock on again. That system became insufficiently cooled, so I swallowed my fear and anxiety, delidded it and applied liquid metal TIM, all while keeping all my fingers and toes crossed that I wouldn't brick it. Results: no bricks here, call it a 10–12-degree reduction in temps even while overclocked in a mini-ITX case. That CPU then went into an ASRock Deskmini A300 as my new home file server, which I populated with an NVMe boot drive and 2 x 5TB hard drives. Those 15mm drives were just a bit too thick to fit in the case, so that started me into physical case mods. And on, and on, and on it has gone...