So, because the last post was a ten minute read of me bitching about work, I’ll do the non-work related stuff in a separate post – this one.
First up: new computer.
I guess it’s been almost a month now since I won this HP Omen Max 45L.
Specs for the curious:
- Ryzen 9 9950X3D
- 128GB of Kingston FURY DDR5 RAM (running at 6000MT/s)
- Two 2TB NVMe M.2 SSDs in RAID 0
- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 (32GB GDDR7)
- 1200W 80-Plus Platinum ATX 3.1 power supply
- ASUS 32″ QLED monitor (sitting next to my 27″ Apple Studio Display)
- SteelSeries APEX PRO G3 keyboard (Hall Effect Keys)
- and a Corsair M65 ultra wired mouse
I won this from a raffle I entered back in September for “The Ultimate Gaming Bundle”; and after posing for a couple of photos, shaking hands with regional managers, and filling out the half-inch thick stack of paperwork for things like certifying that I wasn’t a foreign national and agreeing that I can’t part it out or sell it for a year – I managed to squeeze it all into the car and got it home.
It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever won… It was a bit over $10,000 they said. When I picked it up I had to cover the taxes, which was $985.80.
But, thanks to the AI techpocalypse, that video card alone sells for five-figures currently. The computer, monitor, and peripherals are probably worth close to $20,000 right now.
First computer I’ve ever owned that appreciated in value…
While I’m not exactly a fan of Windows, I have to support it at work – and it was free – so I tolerate it. My CFO is sort of / kind of / maybe contemplating switching to a Mac, which will be a long process. And during that time I’ll have to support bridging his PC(s) and his Mac(s), so it behooves me to have systems I can replicate issues on.
I was pleased to discover that Apple has full iCloud support on the PC, so I have access to all of my shared data, iPhone photos, and even Keychain on the PC… It’s a little clunky, as is to be expected for Windows, but functional.
I will admit that it’s a brilliant machine for gaming – not that I have any spare time for gaming right now, and while it can’t run the same size AI models as my old Apple M3 Ultra, what it can run it runs at 2-3 times faster… Which isn’t surprising really given that the video card alone pulls more wattage than the entire M3 Ultra.
I sold my M3 Ultra to my roommate – with a few hundred off for his old M1 Max Studio that I’m using at work since I sold work my M5 MacBook for a testing project. He will be making payments on it for probably a decade given his SSDI income, which is fine – I know where he lives.
Outside of the computer thing, I’ve put 845 miles on the Tesla and it’s been really nice.
Now that it’s figured out my preferred route for my commute, I let it drive back and forth to work. I also let it drive out to the airport to drop off / pick up my roommate who went to a family reunion… It did the highway part of the drive just fine, but for some reason insists on going to the main security gate instead of departures / arrivals – so I had to take over and navigate around DIA.
I do find it funny that my life here in 2026 is essentially the ‘slice of life’ parts of the Cyberpunk games I used to run back in the 80’s… The computer sitting on my desk is a netrunner’s dream, and my car is fully connected and reads me the news headlines while it drives me to the corpo office I work at…
Like I say – living in the future is pretty cool. 🙂
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