I killed my Windows PC last week. Not with a hammer. Just by deciding not to fix it.
The machine in question is a 2014 Haswell i7 with a GTX 1080 Ti and a Corsair RM850 power supply from 2016. For a decade this system was my workhorse. It compiled code, processed video, and handled transcription work without complaint. Then the lights started flickering.
Not the monitor. The actual room lights. Every time the GPU spun up under load, the overhead lights would dim and pulse. At first I thought the building wiring was going bad. Turns out the building wiring was fine, or at least fine enough. The real problem sat inside the case.
Power supply capacitors age. It is just what they do. After ten years the RM850 was no longer delivering clean power to the components. Under heavy GPU load it would pull hard enough that the ripple and voltage drops became visible in the room’s lighting. The building’s electrical circuit was also near its limit, which compounded the issue. Two marginal systems meeting at exactly the wrong moment.
The fix sounds simple. Buy a new power supply. I checked prices and a quality replacement runs closer to a hundred fifty dollars. That is not a lot of money. But that number stared back at me and I realized something uncomfortable.
I would be spending a hundred bucks to keep a twelve-year-old CPU alive.
The Haswell i7-4970K was a great processor in 2014. It is not a great processor now. The 1080 Ti is still a capable card for certain workloads, but it sits inside a platform that has no upgrade path. DDR4 ram on a dead socket. No future-proofing. No headroom. Just a machine that used to be fast.
Here is what finally tipped the decision. I have been doing a lot of audio transcription work lately. I set up the same transcription pipeline on both the Windows box with its CUDA-accelerated GPU and on my M2 Max Mac running pure CPU. The Mac finished first. Not by a little. By a margin that made me run the test three more times to confirm I had not made a mistake.
The Windows PC with a dedicated graphics card could not outpace a laptop chip doing the same work without GPU acceleration. That result sat in my head for a few days. A machine built specifically for heavy computation was losing to hardware I carry in a backpack.
So I looked at the flickering lights again and did the math differently. Sixty to one hundred fifteen dollars for a power supply. Then what? The CPU is still from 2014. The motherboard is still from 2014. The RAM is still whatever speed was standard when Obama was president. Every component in that case is past the point where investing in it makes sense.
Throwing good money at a dying platform is a trap developers know well. We do it with legacy codebases all the time. Just patch this one function. Just upgrade this one dependency. Before long you have spent forty hours keeping alive a system that should have been rewritten years ago. Hardware is no different.
The Mac does everything I need faster. The PC needs parts just to turn on safely. The hardware spans 2014 to 2016 and it shows. There is no scenario where fixing the power supply leads to a good outcome. Either I fix it and the machine is still slow, or I fix it and something else fails next month.
I pulled the 1080 Ti and listed it for sale. The rest of the machine gets stripped for parts anyone might need. The case might stick around. Everything else goes.
Some people will say I should have kept the PC as a hobby machine or a home server. I get that. There is satisfaction in keeping old hardware running. But I have been down that road before and it always ends the same way. You become a caretaker for a machine that gives nothing back except heat and noise and the occasional sense of accomplishment when it boots.
I would rather have a desk with one cable that goes to a machine that finishes my work before the other machine would have finished loading the application. The M2 Max is not perfect. Nothing is. But it is fast and quiet and the lights in my office stay steady when I render video or transcribe audio.
The lesson is simple. Know when the math has turned against you. A hundred dollars is cheap for a power supply and expensive for a Band-Aid on a system that should have been retired years ago. The flickering lights were not just a hardware problem. They were a warning sign that I was clinging to something that had already been replaced.
I listened eventually. Just took the lights going out to make it obvious.