OK, then. This weekend, I got the Asrock B550 motherboard and its AMD Ryzen 5800X CPU squared away in its case. As this NZXT H6 Flow build comes together, I’m understanding more about what current PCs look like and can do. The NZXT H6 Flow is a stunner (and a pretty good deal at ~US$110). But I’m still waiting for a few parts to completely finish things up. Let me explain.

As NZXT H6 Flow Build Comes Together, What’s Next?

I ordered the Asus Thunderbolt EX5 adapter for this PC. It eats an x16 PCIe slot, but delivers 2Thunderbolt 5 USB-C ports with up to 120 Gbps aggregate bandwidth. More importantly — to me, anyway — it’s licensed for Thunderbolt Share so I can finally try that app out.

I’m also gradually building up an archive hard disk for that system, to transport all the stuff I might want to access from my current production desktop to the new one. It’s been a long, slow process with a huge amount of data and a stupendous number of files involved. Thus, I’m deciding it may take two drives — one for documents and other data files, another for my massive digital music collection — which means one of them will have to plug in via USB. Still thinking…

I’ve got an Asus PCE-AC56 PCIe x1 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter from the old build that I could plug into the new one. But shoot, a Wi-Fi 7 version (PCE-BE6500) costs US$80 these days and might be a better choice. It’s only a fallback anyway: I’m already using the built-in 2.5GbE RJ-45 wired NIC, and it’s working like a charm.

I did bump the memory up from 64 to 128 GB (cost me about US$125 DDR4-2666). It’s pretty snappy, and that gives me room for lots of VMs, which I intend to make more use of going forward, while cutting down on the number of physical PCs in my mini-fleet (current count: 11, with one soon to be decommissioned and 3 more charitably donated to the middle school marching band).

Ultimate Goal: Cutover from i7SkyLake to Flo6

My ultimate goal is to retire my current production PC. It’s built around an Asrock Z170 Extreme7+ motherboard and an i7-6700 Skylake CPU. The mobo made its debut in 2015, but I built the system either in 2016 or 2017. In any case, it’s provided at least 8 years of excellent service and is showing its age.

Funny thing that my “new” system is already 4 years old as I cut over. My attitudes — and my budget — have changed a lot since the days in the late 1990s and early 2000s when I built and tested DIY PCs for Tom’s Hardware. Now that I’m paying for everything, I’m squeezing those dollars much harder before I let go of them.

Hopefully, this “new” system will keep me running Windows for at least another 4 or 5 years before it, too, becomes obsolete. That’s just the way things go in Windows-World, where the relentless influx of newer, faster, better keeps washing older, slower, lesser technologies and hardware away. All I can say to comment is: At least I’m still here, overseeing those changes.