Home improvements are a continuous and sometimes arduous exercise, but it is necessary. So, you have to sometimes bite the bullet and make the changes you need or just simply want! It’s amazing how the right home desktop setup can influence productivity and creativity!
Due to ongoing frustrations and practicality issues, we have been planning a major upgrade of our home IT infrastructure for a while now, and in the last few months, it all started coming together. Options were narrowed down, suppliers selected and quotations received. Orders starting getting placed in early December, and as the vacation period started, so did the upgrades.
I will be posting a series of blog posts on some of the noticeable upgrades we have done, which will hopefully give you some ideas to consider in your home improvement projects, which I hope will be useful to those of you who are search of faster or more reliable internet connectivity and don’t want to suffer extremely long waiting periods for uploads.
The Right Home Desktop Setup or a Laptop?
Let’s start with the critical decision to move away from using general purpose laptops to a more dedicated and high-performance desktop setup. Laptops are very practical for general use, but not so much for intensive photo editing and definitely not so for 1080p or 4K video editing.
Of course, high performance laptops solve these problems, but they do come at a significant cost and loses the inherent practicality of being mobile. A desktop setup is more effective and efficient for these tasks, and since we plan on doing more photography and videography in 2020, a desktop setup is more suited for our purpose.
After careful consideration, we opted to invest in a gaming PC setup as the basis for our system. Unlike general purpose desktops, gaming PC’s offer so much more in terms of configuration and looks! And yes, having an eye-catching system in front of you does help with creativity. I can now change the colour of the lights on the keyboard to suit my mood……..yay!
AMD vs Intel
The only real requirement we had was that it had to be AMD Ryzen based system, as opposed to Intel. The launch of the Ryzen 3000 CPU’s has turned the tide in favour of AMD, and AMD is generally much better value for money. Intel is in serious trouble! We had two options, find a pre-built system meeting our requirements or buy the individual items and assemble the system ourselves.
Because of all the planned home improvement projects we had lined up, we opted to buy a pre-built PC. And yes, this may be frowned upon by some of you, but the choice was made based on careful consideration of cost, time and effort.
In the end it worked out extremely well for us, because Santa stepped in and the system that was actually delivered to us was an upgrade from what we originally ordered, at no additional cost to us.
Monitor and Extras
The setup uses an existing 24” Samsung curved LED monitor, and we have bought a gaming keyboard/mouse/headphone combo kit and upgraded the RAM from 8GB to 32GB for those demanding 4K video editing tasks.
Now that the system is up and running, all I can say is that I am thoroughly impressed and it has already saved me a significant amount of time and effort in creating new content. And did I mention it looks absolutely amazing!
Check out this video to see what the actual setup looks like. By the way, it took about a minute to upload this video on YouTube.
How has this setup really helped me specifically?
You may have already noticed that I have been blogging more frequently – that in itself is evidence of productivity being improved. I can’t tell you how the creativity is being tapped into, but I am sure you will notice significant progress. I am feeling so creative, just need more time to unleash all my ideas…but so far, so good, I am happy with the progress. The speed in terms of connectivity using the desktop at home is so much more appealing. I also love using the curved big screen – well, bigger than than the laptop.
In addition to using the desktop for general purpose tasks, photo and video editing, it also serves as a controller for our entire IT infrastructure for setup and configuration. Some things to look out for in upcoming posts include:
- Migrating from ADSL to Rain 5G Internet
- Implementing a UniFi Wireless Network Setup
- Running a Plex Media Server on a Raspberry Pi
- Low Cost DIY Home Surveillance System using Raspberry Pi’s
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Featured Image Credit: http://us.coolermaster.com/product/Detail/case/MasterBox-Series/masterbox-k500l.html
It was perfect the first time. This is very really unique helpful information. I learn so much from you as well! Keep it up.
Interesting As usuell. My issue isn’t the Internet Connection, Speed, etc. it’s getting all Equipment on the Same Staus besides syncing. I’ve started to working on an external Drive to my iMac and I’ll probably see from there.
Looks very cool…..need to get me a gaming PC!
It is indeed – don’t know why we didn’t go this route sooner but better late than never 😉
Wondeful read. It really does make a difference – these little things all add up. My writing has slowed down… and I think I have figured out why so will be writing about that soon. You are always very inspiring. All the best!
Hello Maya 🙂 always a pleasure to hear from you. I’m glad you’ve noted that it has slowed down…you’re going to feel a sense of accomplishment as soon as you pick up the pace and I know that you will. All the best, I’m looking forward to it 🙂