A monster approaches

 
I have a 3-4 year PC buying cycle. It was interrupted in 2020 when both my desktops died within a few weeks of each other. My main machine died because the graphics card had become more clogged with dust that I'd realised. So I bought a new PC a year early, missing the Nvidia 30-series by a couple of months, although in reality the crazy supply problems that applied to GPUs would probably have made it impossible to get one of the new cards anyway.

(To be clear the main PC brought back to life with a Nvidia 2060 which is now used mostly by my sons for playing Roblox. My youngest son even plays with Blender, sometimes.)

So here we are again.

I decided to get my new machine as the latest generation of Nvidia GPUs are released. By complete coincidence, the next generation of Intel CPUs are also available. So when Scan.co.uk send me my new workstation, next week, it should be an absolute performance monster.


CPU Today: Intel Core i9-10900K CPU @ 3.70GHz - Median score: 253.64
CPU Next Week: 13th Gen Intel Core i9-13900K - Median score: 575.01

GPU Today: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 3216.09
GPU Next Week: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 12205.49

Okay, so synthetic benchmarks are designed so exagerate performance differences, but the new machine is surely going to be very fast. It's also equipped with 64GB of system ram, in case I want to go absolutely crazy.

It's ended up costing as much as the last two computers I bought, put together. Crazy money. Also the end of my buying cycle. This beast will need to last 5-6 years. I can't imagine I'll have the money to spec like this again.


Fuel Storage Station

Ships in Orbital Elements still need reaction mass. Here's a refueling station idea. A bit like a gas station, in orbit around a moon or asteroid.

A first stab (actually the fourth attempt):