Sir Beregond

Got two matching 650 Ti Boosts on the way.

When I started Help Desk in 2009, it was an entry level position for $11/hr. I was 18, had no certifications or a college degree as I dropped out of college in 2010 and definitely didn't have any prior experience that was relevant to it. To this day I still do not have a degree and have a grand total of two certifications to my name (ITIL Foundations v3 and SAFe 5.0 Practitioner). All to say that the reality is that simply getting a degree or a certification won't guarantee you a non-entry level position. But at the same time, if you get your foot in the door, a lack of them won't necessarily hold you back either. That said, I have a lot of admiration for anyone at any point in life saying they want to do something to improve themselves or their lives. I think you'd do well starting out in Help Desk and combined with your future treatments to help address your pain issues longer term, I think you can put your mind to small goals like @Slaughtahouse said and work towards those. Things like the interpersonal skills and others are all skills like anything else that can be worked on and developed if you are willing. As for any of the other negatives, there's not much use dwelling on those and allowing them to hold you back. Figure out what you are good at and build on that, the things you are not good at can be worked on with time as you move forward. Break everything down into small achievable nuggets or micro-goals that build towards something bigger. Honestly when I started my IT career in help desk, I was extremely shy, not good with interpersonal skills, wasn't very confident in myself. As time went on and I gained experience, those were things that I was able to work on. Help desk you talk to random strangers or employees of the company you are supporting. I learned how to crack jokes, make an analogy when something didn't make sense, etc. and for most it helped wind them down a bit and humanize the interaction. When I did desktop support from 2010 to 2014, I got to talk to, get to know most everyone in an office of about 500 people which made talking to them easier and working on their issues better, especially if something wasn't a quick fix or needed something more radical or they weren't going to like the outcome. During this time I also learned how to read my audience. The average user is not tech savvy with what you are supporting so leave the highly technical lingo out. Same with executives. They want the tl;dr one liner of whatever you need from them. Anyway, I later moved into software and software release where I started interfacing with many different departments and in higher level positions later on, had some authority on how things were done. I'm a release manager now for a fortune 10, but I still have 0 degree and two certs to my name lol. Why? I suck in classrooms and I learn by doing, so really looking back it was all about just getting in on the ground floor and putting in the work to gain experience. I'd be lying if I said I didn't have help along the way. I had a mentor at one of my earlier support jobs and as they moved up, thought of me for new jobs and I'd apply over there and usually get the job (not always). In other cases, I took some big risks on some contract to hire positions vs some safer full time slots that propelled me to better things later on. Nowadays I'm pretty gregarious around work, confident, and pretty decent with my interpersonal and communication skills, but I do sometimes still catch myself. Sometimes in my pursuit of logical change I have to make sure I am not tearing other people down and how they do things. Anyway, I say all this to say, there is always a way if you are willing and there are always ways to help manage or mitigate things you feel are holding you back. Sometimes its the mind that is the biggest thing holding one back. It was for me a lot over the years. But small incremental goals over time help build to bigger and better things and seeing what you can achieve often helps drive your attitude and want to reach higher.

OK gotcha. Knew it was something like that for Zen 4.

I don't have it setup yet as I am still acquiring parts so I can't say for sure. I'd imagine you're not wrong about out of the box. I guess I've just seen a lot more opportunity for places you can tweak whether all core, or with RAM in a more traditional sense vs say messing with PBO and CO on AMD and RAM overclocking being completely limited by the Infinity Fabric clock. I heard they decoupled that in Zen 4, but sounds like there is still a sweet spot for Zen 4 and not much point of anything faster. Not to say that's a bad thing, again for just getting a system up for the average person. More I just want to push to the limit and see what I can do. I really want to do more HWBot stuff. I mean you can do HWBot with anything new or old. I just want to get a good test bench to do some modern stuff on.

Makes sense. I totally get it and its hard to disagree. I think Ryzen has for the most part provided everything anyone could need. I think Zen 3 really pushed them to that spot. I wasn't quite sold yet on Zen 2. I don't care much for the launch MSRP's for some SKUs starting with Zen 3, but they quickly course correct I notice. About my only beef with AMD is that overclocking on Ryzen systems is boring which is why my test bench that is in progress, I decided to go back to an Intel based platform. For someone getting back into the fun of overclocking, I didn't feel like Ryzen was scratching that itch. About all that's to be gained there is from RAM timing tweaks. Not much you can do frequency wise due to the Infinity Fabric. PBO for the most part manages everything else so there's not much else to do there unless you start playing with curve optimizer and that's a PITA. All to say, Ryzen is perfect for getting pretty much a plug and play experience. I still feel Intel is where you go if you are wanted to get into overclocking and pushing the limits. But for my daily, happy to stay on my 5900X. Sips power by comparison and runs me just fine. Until I built my Zen 3 system, wasn't really seeing much point upgrading my 4790k because the Intel gen on gen gains were so minimal.

Yeah it didn't sound like much of a MHz boost, so there must be some IPC gain somewhere, but I hope that wasn't just adding a ton more power draw.

Yeah kinda odd. When they refreshed Haswell the 4770k just got replaced by the 4790k. Maybe they are expecting a generational uplift here, but does seem weird.

Bought a cheap 13100 to play with for now, just going to wait for the 14900k at this stage for my Z790 Dark.

I always upvote Picard facepalm.

At this stage, the value of more cores is less for gaming itself and more for having a ton of other crap running at the same time while gaming. As far as I know, there are very few games that can actually leverage all the cores once you hit 8 or more cores. And in the case of Ryzen CPUs, you definitely take a small hit for crossing the infinity fabric between CCD's on the 12 and 16 cores parts (Zen 3 and 4), Zen 2 even worse as it is two groups of 4 core CCX's per CCD. Interesting to see in that CP2077 chart that there really isn't much of a different between the 5600X3D and the 5800X3D.

This came in yesterday. Will run it with my 4790k system. Need to find a DVI to HDMI adapter though lol.

I don't think this is surprising news. GPUs were the bulk of their business, so without those it makes sense that they need to shrink considerably. If that means they are also leaving the motherboard and PSU space, then I don't know. What else do you have at that point. Bad news all around. Wish I bought more EVGA stuff throughout the years.

Love that. I liked that movie. Cool bat!

See that is the needle moving corps like Nvidia is hoping for. Consumer to say hey $1000 80-class branded cards? No problem. Its not "too bad". It's $300 more than the last gen on a lower tier chip and mem config, but its "not too bad". No doubt. Nvidia's FE cards the last 2 gens are rock solid in their engineering (though may leave overclockers wanting - my 3080 Ti is very power limited vs three 8-pin models), but they are absolutely direct competing with their AIBs. AIBs are getting lower and lower margins each gen which I believe is a huge reason EVGA called it quits. Nvidia on the other hand are getting massive margins.

I mean Nvidia raised base MSRPs sure, but the AIB's then thought it was cool to add $200-$300 on top of that. Looking at you Strix cards. Back in the day I bought a GTX 980 Strix and it was like $10 more than a base/reference model 980. Where the hell is this +$200-$300 coming from is what I want to know.

Dumb AIB pricing for their top OC models with the biggest coolers as if the 4080 needed them. ASUS seems to be the biggest offender.

I aspire to be at least half as cool as you some day. Love all the updates with the builds, but also just the awesome space you've created for them.

Speaking of getting cheaper. 2TB 980 Pro is $100 now:

Saw this at Amazon and Best Buy. Sorry! Something went wrong! WWW.AMAZON.COM Best Buy International: Select your Country - Best Buy WWW.BESTBUY.COM Shop online at Best Buy in your country and language of choice. Best Buy provides online shopping in a number of countries and languages.

Should be, its just a refresh of Raptor Lake, but I am hoping that means it has enough of a boost to be worth calling 14th gen.

Even I am getting tired of ranting.

Great write up! I will definitely be looking into this when my daily rig needs more storage. Gen 3 speeds are fine for me for that. I was really disappointed that the Asus Dark Hero board only came with 2 nvme slots. I'll have to double check my radiator clearance for the x4 slot though.

Preach it. I was really excited last year as there were quite a few comps I was able to participate in with just my current hardware. This year I think there might be one? I don't have a place to store a bunch of random old hardware bougt on eBay like others do, nor does it make sense for me to spend my money there when I can be setting up a test bench. I was very disappointed in this year's comps for Team Cup. There is basically nothing I can participate in with what I have on hand.

Oh...nice SR-3...