My first introduction to the X58 platform was back in 2009 when I purchased a Dell (yeah, yeah, I know) XPS 435T/9000 series Studio XPS. I made many upgrades in it over time because it really impressed me as a promising unit, well worth the investment in upgrades. It was the last pre-built desktop I ever bought and I bought it because I couldn't build a Bloomfield rig cheaper than the price that I could get the Dell pre-built for.
I am not gonna knock you for that at all. Gotta do what ya gotta do, and yeah, Bloomfield was a super hot commodity - they were powerful as heck, and very reasonably priced for the bang you got from them. I actually bought my 965 EE CPU from eBay after a year after I built a C2Q 6600-based rig (in 2008), just for giggles. Glad I did, as in 2011, lightning wiped out the C2Q rig massively (drives, PSU and mobo all fried - drives I recovered, rest was junk). Having that 965 allowed me to plan an emergency build that was supposed to be my machine for a few years (I was in my Masters program at the time, and did not have time to futs around with a build - since I had the CPU, I built the rig around it). Turned out it worked so damned well I kept it going until I finally decided I had both the money and the time during the Pandemic to replace it lol.
Admittedly, it can't hold a candle to my ASUS X99-E WS unit, but as far as durability and stability go it's a winner.
Exactly. I needed a new machine that could run multiple VMs simultaneously for work, as well as other things, so when the time came, I was ready to go.
To be fair, though, this rig I've had for 3 years is pretty rock solid. It has had a few small issues, but nothing with the hardware, so much as crappy support from MSI, more than anything. And it is fast, at least right now. So, I can still see it being (reasonably) fast in a few years, too.
She told me she's watched all the PCs that come in and out of this house (the ones I rebuilt and repaired for clients) and pointed out that the only time I had to work on her unit is when she got upgrades, which is true. Smart kid.
Absolutely a smart kid.
As far as games are concerned they prefer the older games and the 15 year old (who inherited the XPS at 11) is playing around with Python now and experimenting with Linux. She wants a career in computer science and for some odd reason she won't look sideways at UEFI. The very idea of locking anyone out of BIOS is horrendous to her. I tried to explain that you can still access BIOS via UEFI but it's a losing argument. To each their own.
Hmmm. I put a password lock on the BIOS, because while that might be a horrifying thing when you're talking about a home machine, it's also a huge security risk.
I've disabled the ability to boot from any device except the SSD that Windows is installed on. If I need to boot from something else, gotta enter the admin password. This way the machine only boots what I want it to boot.
Is it likely that someone comes over and tries to do that? Probably not.
Is it much more likely that I have a bootable UFD plugged in and the system gets rebooted onto that device? Probably.
Is it possible that there is something hiding on there that I don't want on my machine? Yes, unfortunately, no matter how good AM suites are these days, things can still slip by. So, I lock my machines down.
So, I can see both sides of it - from the standpoint of the convenience of having it readily available to the slip side of it being a security risk. For Ss & Gs, make a bootable Linux UFD and stick it on her machine and reboot her into that *nix environment lol. Then you can explain my reasoning on why locking down BIOS and UEFI is not necessarily a bad thing.
Speaking of *nix - that platform screams running *nix, as well. I ran Gentoo on it as the main OS for almost 2 years, when I was tired of 7, and 10 was not yet out. Big tricks were: Self-compiled kernel loading only the modules I needed it to, so no HAL querying at boot, and of course, SSDs. Also used part of the 12 GB of RAM as a RAM-based temp storage for compiling, made compiling programs a lot easier, and faster.
Of course, I love complicated things, so building from Scratch as Gentoo has you do was right up my alley. lol.
After 20 years of PC building I did finally build my own gaming rig but I'm not really a hard core gamer. I just like building and fiddling with PCs. Still, it's always nice to have a back up unit on hand, so I settled on an AMD X570 HERO with a Ryzen 7 8 core CPU. Now, admittedly these units will run circles around X58 platforms but how long they will last remains to be seen. The caps on the original Dell unit are leaking.
I'm not a 'hardcore' gamer, as I never play FPS games, but I love racing games, and the entire Diablo and Elder Scrolls series. I'm currently working on finishing my first go at Diablo IV. But my machine is first and foremost a workstation, and is a gaming machine as an after thought.
