Intro

It’s been eight months since my last blog post or YouTube video. I’d planned to keep adding value-packed content based on Astro and technical stuff, but life and work intervened. It’s been a crazy eight months, but I won’t bore you with the details. I will just say it’s been work, work work, and then some more work sprinkled on top of even more work. What I have found in this eight months is we all need to find a work-life balance and actually live it! You need to make time to enjoy those around you and the things that bring you joy, because our time on this planet is limited.

While I would love to say I was able to image tons of new things and do a bunch of amazing stuff I sadly was only able to visit the GNTO twice and image from my back yard once. Not because of weather but because of work, and being so tired on the weekends from working as well. Also during the last eight months I did a lot of home projects when I could fine time. One of the big ones was converting our mud room into my Wife’s new office and while that was going on I decided to give my office a new face lift as well. Maybe not the best time for more work but it had been been fifteen years with the same setup in my space and same boring white walls. I spent lots of time on YouTube to learn some new skills, one of my favorites was How to Paint Like a Pro. While I have painted many a time I learned some new tricks and also learned how do some patch work for walls and I even learned that painting can actually be fun and it gave me a little Zen time in my head space even though I was still working.

The Computer Conundrum

Eventually I found time to go back and process the Devil Comet or should I say Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks which I imaged in March but didn’t put together till July https://www.astrobin.com/jq0wiv/. My Dell XPS 8950 has been humming a long crushing PixInsight, however it really got a work out following Adam Blocks Comets videos. Big shout out to Adam Block, I just appreciate that gentlemen and his detail he spends explaining the processes within PixInsight.

Any who the issue with stacking Comets is I was using Drizzled data which took my 50MB images and caused them to be like 300MB per single files and my little Intel chugged, not to the point of not being unusable but to the point what it felt like I wasting precious time, again back to the limited time I spoke of in the Intro. So what was I to do? Well I decided to purchase an Apple Mac Studio M2 Max, even though it was rated slower than my 12th Gen Dell. At the time I was having a really hard time embracing sitting down in front of Windows, probably because I was working all day at work on Windows 11, Windows Sever 2012-2022 and then in evenings when it was time to play I was right back on Windows 11 again.

While I absolutely loved the Mac and a lot of the features I did not like the fact I was locked into a soldered on hard drives and ram and had no ability to upgrade. Also PixInsight is not designed to use Apple Silicon currently and is still doing the virtual Rosetta crap which caused it to run slower than Windows. So, I sold it off after less than two months. No offense to Apple, because honestly it was a beautifully crafted work of art on my desk that I enjoyed having but alas it was just to slow for my needs…

Choosing the next Processor

So before I purchase hardware I always like to use PassMark to dive into system speed to get an idea of how fast it will preform. Now I know there is tons of benchmark software out there but for me I have used PassMark for as long as I can remember. I was contemplating purchasing another Intel but after they shit the bed with their 13th and 14th Gen processors I decided to wait on AMD’s Ryzen 9 9950X which released last month and after a week or so the PassMark numbers showed up which where better than the 14th Gen i9 but not by a land slide.

While both these processors run circles around my 12th gen I decided it was time to go “ALL IN” like I did in a friendly poker game with friends and with my mother load of cash I decided to choose the AMD Threadripper 7960X which is basically 2X faster than my 12th Gen Intel or 2.002627519043487 faster🤣

Using Google and ChatGPT to Decide

So before choosing the Threadripper I spent as much free time as I could muster up from June 18th to August 19th searching and reading articles about AMD and also watching YouTube videos. I checked my browser history and I had 1234 searches on the word AMD, 542 on Threadripper, 230 searches on the 9950x and another 152 on 7960x. Like I said I was reading and reading and researching like crazy, and even had some very in-depth conversations with ChatGTP about video cards, processors and what would be the best route to move forward with my plans of using PixInsight, Android Studio, compiling Android Open Source Project and using multiple other application like Affinity Photo, Luminar Neo and Wondershare.

Now I will be honest it was really weird chatting with a computer language model but it was also very insightful and it helped me poise questions about speed gains like the following about using a Threadripper 7960x over the Ryzen 9 9950x when compiling AOSP and stacking images in PixInsight.

“When it comes to compiling AOSP or stacking large images in PixInsight, the performance gains from the Threadripper 7960x over the Ryzen 9 9950x can be significant, especially due to the difference in core counts and multithreading capabilities.

Ryzen 9 9950x: 16 cores / 32 threads

Threadripper 7960x: 24 cores / 48 threads

In short:

  • For AOSP compiling, the Threadripper 7960x can likely save you 40-60% of the time compared to the Ryzen 9 9950x.
  • For PixInsight stacking, expect a 20-30% speed improvement with the Threadripper.

Given your goal of reducing time wasted on these tasks, the Threadripper could justify the extra cost if time is a critical factor in your workflow.”

Choosing my vendor, Hello XIDAX!

Normally when I buy a new PC I always purchase Dell, but sadly Dells Motherboards are lacking, specially with the Threadripper series and only supporting PCIe 4.0 x4 for M.2 drives. I even contemplated purchasing all the parts myself and building my first computer since the early 2000’s. However after checking out all of AMDs partners and spending multiple hours researching I choose XIDAX over STEIGER DYNAMICS. Again another conversation with ChatGPT helped me make that decision.

STEIGER DYNAMICS vs XIDAX Comparison

The biggest selling point for me was the “LIFE TIME WARRANTY“!!!!!! Yes you read that right XIDAX offers a life time warranty as long as you are the sole owner of the PC. However I will note you need to contact support at any time you add any extra hardware under the covers as it could void that warranty for different parts. So XIDAX it is!

The Build

Ok boys and girls hold on to your seats, this is no ordinary build or low end gaming system or your Dad’s Hewlett Packard. No, this is a full on workstation that will run circles around all that and I opted not to cut corners even though my pocket book took a huge hit and then some! After selling my Mac, my Dell XPS 8950, a bunch of ChessNoteR’s, and also taking some of my 10 Year Anniversary bonus from my day job I spent all the money on the following Monster.

So how did this work out for me? Well you are just going to have to wait since it will be delivered next week….