Thanks to a lucky financial break, I managed to finally upgrade my computer with a modern motherboard. In just a few months from now, it would have been a full 10 years since I got my previous one. Shocking as it may sound, it was such a durable and high-end board that it lasted me a whole decade... and I'm sure it will still be regarded as pretty modern years from now! Never had issues playing games, doing animation in Blender, even running my cheap VR headset on it. It was ancient technology though, maxed out on RAM and limited by the architecture of the day; The new mobo and processor are middle tier by comparison, and even so they're times faster due to how much newer they are.

The installation had me a little nervous at first. Mainly because my old mobo is so old, it didn't have UEFI and Secure Boot... and I didn't want to reinstall my Linux distro from scratch either. I had to do a bit of hacking to get the legacy GRUB2 in openSUSE to adapt to UEFI, but it wasn't anything the rescue console couldn't solve. There are only minor annoyances now, such as most temperature / fan sensors not being detected by the kernel and viewable in the system monitor, which I'm hearing might be fixed in the upcoming 5.4 version. The rest is very much okay and just minor oddities.

I only did one benchmark comparison for my own curiosity, from one of my Cycles VR projects. On the old CPU, rendering a given frame took close to 10 minutes. With the new board, rendering that same frame takes only 3 minutes instead... literally 3 times faster. I didn't even overclock it, the CPU is running at default frequency and on the stock cooler! Obviously this means I'll be able to render some animation projects much quicker, which will help me finish more Blender projects that took very long to even preview let alone produce final renders of.

I've been thinking about using the old board to create a server, I have enough older hardware to put together a new machine. Problem is I would have to rent it, enough to cover the extra electricity cost and get a little something extra too. If anyone is aware of any product or company that allows people to rent drive space or processing power for money, please let me know as this may come in handy.