Vulcan sits on his fiery throne

 The new workstation is mostly set up. Blender is installed, and countless add-ons and asset packs are installed. We're ready for business, I think.

Side-by-side render competition

Errr.... what?

The new machine is fast, but it's not wildly faster than the 4090 machine. Other system parts, such as the PCIe 5 SSD and latest-gen CPU, might help reduce some bottlenecks, but the side-by-side render test didn't show a wild uplift in rendering performance.

There will be more testing to follow...

So far, okay. The quirks: The machine initially didn't boot up. Then, I installed the latest GPU driver and was rewarded with a BLACK SCREEN—the very thing these driver updates are supposed to fix.

Dead System Saga: Episode 7: The Return

Unpacking

The beast is back! I have named it "Vulcan", the Roman name for the Greek god of fire. Hopefully, this doesn't result in an irony attack when the damned thing catches fire.

Everything looked okay on inspection. The GPU support tool was still in place but a bit wonky. 

Wonky, but nothing appears broken.

That said, the machine took a few boot-up attempts to show a display, which was a Bitlocker unlock screen. Once that was resolved, everything looked good.

First Job: install Mouse without Borders, a keyboard and mouse share application, so I can use the keyboard and mouse across both my machines. It took a few attempts, but that's working.

Next Job: Transfer the Blender directory. 1.34TB of data, which Windows predicts will take three and a half hours to copy from my Western Digital Portable SSD.

All my Blender eggs are now in three baskets (Athena/Vulcan (new machine)/portable storage.)