What's old is new again

It was about a dozen years ago that I built my first desktop.

Yes, this is the start of a monologue. Apologies in advance.

I had played PC games well before this; I remember way back when my family used to have a binder full of CDs. However, prior to my teens the only electronics I cared about were my Wii and Wii U. I had some games on my $200 Toshiba Satellite, such as Civilization V and Terraria, but nothing major. I was fine with the terrible integrated Intel HD Graphics of the time, until I suddenly wasn't.

I can't remember exactly how this happened, but when I was roughly 13 I really started wanting a desktop PC that could really game unlike the dual-core Ivy Bridge CPU in my laptop. I was definitely receptive to the ads I would hear for Intel Haswell quad-cores and Sapphire graphics cards on ReviewTechUSA videos. I really wanted a Core i7-4790k and an R9 290X, they just seemed like the coolest components for some reason.

Me and my dad ended up finding some build guide on some website, can't remember which, for an entry level PC. I still remember the exact components: an A8-7650K, an MSI A78M-E35 motherboard, one 4GB stick of Crucial Sport DDR3-1600 memory, a 1TB Toshiba hard drive, and a Rosewill FBM-01 case. Okay I did forget what power supply I bought but I think it was like a 450 watt model, probably from EVGA. I didn't have a discrete GPU or a custom cooler, just integrated Radeon graphics and the stock cooler; my dad wasn't the type to just drop about a thousand dollars for something like this.

We built the thing in an afternoon. My dad was confused where the ribbon cable for the HDD was. He was also shocked that the motherboard didn't come with any WiFi card at all and complained to Amazon or Newegg support, can't remember which. When we finally got around to installing our legitimately purchased copy of Windows 7 from a DVD drive, he told me to make an OS partition and a partition for everything else. I did not do that because I didn't feel like it. He was very disappointed.

Despite this PC build being very budget, that thing really impressed me! I was able to crank up all the settings in Civ V to max, and I was shocked how good the water could look. I had also started playing Skyrim around this time and I was happy I was able to get the game to run at a good framerate, but I wanted more. I had read about ways to improve gaming performance, particularly on an APU, and saw something about "dual channel memory," and all I had to do was get another stick of RAM. I got it, plugged it in, and wow the performance went up quite a bit!

That very first PC no longer exists. I sold the APU, I got rid of the PSU because it didn't have enough power plugs for the R9 380 I got about a year later, I ditched the case because it kind of sucked, and the board and memory went into a ChromeOS build I did for fun a couple years later. I used to have that copy of Windows (upgraded to 11) until a couple of years ago when I finally ran into the limit of how many different PCs it could be used for. I still have that 1TB HDD though; no idea if it works, I haven't spun it up in almost a decade.

A few years of erratic and spontaneous and objectively stupid computer purchases later, I graduated high school, and on a whim applied for a freelance position at NotebookCheck. They took me on, and fast forward about a decade later to today and I've built myself a pretty decent record of writing stuff about computers at quite a few places. But actually, I overshot a little bit because 2024 is kind of the point of all this. That was the year I started my own YouTube channel, Silicon Insights. I put it on ice in early 2025 because I wanted to focus on my newfound work in the world of technical writing, and also because I kind of needed a break.

Well, now I'm feeling like the break has gone on for more than long enough. Silicon Insights is back up and running, this time with articles! To be clear, I will resume making videos for the channel, I just want a traditional text-based website both for variety and also because making a whole video for every idea I come up with is a massive pain in the ass.

For those among you that have even paid the slightest amount of attention to the industry as of late, you might be surprised I'm deciding to do this when it's literally hell right now. While SI used to be able to get storage components for review extremely easily, I don't think that will be happening again any time soon. I don't even have a desktop test bench right now, because what would I even test?

Now, that doesn't mean I'm compromising on SI's founding principle of great hardware testing. I'm still gonna test hardware, it's just gonna be some pretty weird stuff. But I do think the content will be good, because I've kind of rediscovered my love for technology and I've broadened my horizons. I think it'll be good.

So, Silicon Insights is back. For the few of you who were fans of the original, I think you'll like the new version. For everyone else, I hope you're curious about what I'll be doing on here and on the channel.

If you'd like to support SI, there are many things you can do. Reading or watching SI content is obviously good (and you get something out of it), and as is commenting or liking or sharing it. Subscribing to this blog and/or the channel is also really appreciated. If you want to go even further beyond and help SI out financially, you can either send us a one-time tip via this link or by clicking the Support SI button at the top of the page, or you can sign up for a paid subscription, basically a monthly/yearly donation as SI has no premium content at this time (though this may change in the future).

Fun fact: Silicon Insights never made even a penny in its original run. You could be the first person to give me a dollar for this thing! And thousands of dollars after that, you could also give me the buck pushes SI into break-even territory! Wouldn't that be something?

I've also got Silicon Insights established on BlueSky, Instagram, and Discord if you're interested. I've recruited my wife to help me out with social media stuff and I'm hoping whatever we're putting out on those first two platforms will be worth it. I'll also be in the Discord server, along with other community members, or at least that's the idea.

Thank you all for reading!