2025 recap and 2026 plans.
Gonna be a little shorter when it comes to the recap as aside from the big refresh of the T1's custom loop not a whole lot has changed on my desk this year. The push/pull radiator setup is really working wonders though, in terms of performance and noise level it's pretty much equal to the old setup despite lacking the extra 240mm radiator. Inside the case the new pneumatic fittings and tubing have also held up well, the tubes did not leach anything into the loop and there haven't been any leaks despite having had some concerns initially about the fittings holding up long term given that they're technically not rated for liquid cooling coolants. Having a lot more room inside the case thanks to the much smaller and simpler plumbing also turned out to be extremely helpful because my motherboards CMOS battery decided to just die on me back in August!
I'm not entirely sure if this should've come as a surprise or be expected after having had the motherboard for close to 4 years, though whenever I'm not actively using the PC I do always cut off the power from the strip it's plugged into so I'm leaning a little more towards the latter. On the Asus B550-I the battery is hidden under the cover for the rear I/O and VRM heatsink, glued to the housing of the ethernet port and unlike the standard CR2032 batteries you'd find on the larger motherboard form factors it's also using one that has a tiny connector fixed to it. Gaining access to the battery is fortunately very easy, all the screws needed to remove that I/O cover were on the front side of the board so I didn't have to disassemble the entire PC just to swap it out. But what wasn't so trivial was plugging the connector of the new battery back in as the header is partially covered by the VRM heatsink, careful tweezer work and a bit of patience were needed to get that job done.
One of the smaller additions to the setup this year was a JCALLY JM6 Pro DAC/AMP dongle. I got curious to see whether or not motherboard onboard audio was really as bad as they say and at €19.90 it wasnt exactly a huge investment for something that is meant to be more than adequate for my Truthear Zero:RED IEMs. The sound definitely improved in a way that even my not so audio enthusiast ears can tell, it's now less muddy compared to how it was over onboard audio though overall I wouldn't call it a night and day difference. There is also the value of having a decent DAC/AMP seperate from the motherboard as I'm not beholden to whatever manufacturers slap onto their boards in case the audio on a future one truly turns out to be unlistenable. So all in all it was a decent enough purchase with the only minor downside being that all of the USB ports on my motherboard are now occupied.
Another change was that I swapped over from English to Japanese for my manga, this came after making the snap decision to learn Japanese from the result of doing a bit of math and discovering that the originals are a lot cheaper for me to buy than the English translations. Provided it's enough volumes per order to even out the higher shipping costs to Germany the price per volume ends up at around two-thirds of what the translations had cost me. CDJapan, my choice of retailer also packs things a lot more secure, has more reliable tracking and despite the longer distance the shipping times are actually faster than all the UK based stores I've used in the past so thats also a really nice upside.
As an additional tool to help me learn Japanese I also got a little notebook for my desk. It's consists of two Hobonichi graph A6 notebooks inside a simple leather cover and a Pentel Orenz Nero mechanical pencil in the 0.3mm lead size, stationery stuff isn't really something I wanna dive in too deep (already got a lot going on!) so it's nothing too fancy but still something that makes taking notes at the desk feel a little different than just writing for the pure utility of it with whatever ballpoint pen and paper is lying around. Since getting the notebook I also started using it for note-taking in games, mostly for achivement tracking and such where it's a welcome change over tabbing out as it doesn't completely take me out of the experience, additionally it's also making me rediscover the joys of writing by hand a little bit although I'm not exactly self-confident in my grade school-ass handwriting.
Moving onto next year and something that I originally planned but ultimately decided against was an upgrade to some of the core components of the PC. After wrapping up the external radiator project earlier this year I started thinking it might be time to replace my 5600X given that it's the weakest part of the build (together with a move to AM5, so a new motherboard and RAM together with it) but just looking at what I'm currently playing and planning to play next year an upgrade really didn't seem necesarry. DCS runs fine enough thanks to the relatively modest resolution of the Index's lenses, Dark Souls Remastered doesn't even tickle the 3080 Ti (I'll probably be playing the other two for most of 2026 and those shouldn't cause any trouble for the GPU either), the most demanding game I play is Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing enabled and even that one I'm perfectly fine with running it at the just okay-ish framerate of 40 fps. The absolute disaster currently going on with the skyrocketing RAM prices is also a great reason to not make any upgrades to the PC right now.
The one big project that is planned for next year will be the overhaul of my whole flight sim setup, a good deal of the groundwork has already been laid out with regards to aquiring and paying for most of the components. However I'm not gonna get into what exact parts I got just yet since some of them aren't exactly off the shelf and I'm honestly not sure how it will all turn out in the end, though what is certain is that I'll have to pick up some soldering skills and learn CAD modelling to bring this project to fruition so I'm making good on wanting to do some proper DIY work at the very least.
Beyond that there isn't really anything else on the menu, maybe some new switches for my Iris keyboard as a handful of the current ones started to get stuck on the upstroke for like a split second which makes them feel kinda bad to use, the recently announced Steam Frame also looks interesting, it'd be the most natural upgrade from my Index but even without any pricing revealed yet it's not going to be a purchase for this year as I might have to allot more of the deskspace budget towards the flight sim setup and tools to support it. Well this about wraps things up, in the past I've been kinda bad at documenting in-progress projects since I usually get into sort of a zone when I'm actively working on stuff and with the cockpit project starting to look more and more daunting it might be a little while before the next deskspace update, thanks for reading!
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