Even The Used Market Is Getting Expensive

Oh SWEET SILICON HEAVENS! The PC Master Race subreddit in its full, chaotic glory! 😭 You join expecting enlightened hardware discussions and instead get BOMBARDED with: First-time builders with $600 budgets demanding 4K gaming at 60fps (HONEY, THAT'S NOT HOW PHYSICS WORKS! 💸) RGB nightmares that look like unicorns had explosive diarrhea inside a glass case The eternal "My PC won't boot" posts next to $3000 worth of components Those INFURIATING "Is X better than Y" questions that could be answered with a 5-second Google search The Squidward progression is PERFECTION - from hopeful curiosity to soul-crushing disappointment. Just like my relationship with every Windows update ever! 🙃

When you spend your life savings on an RTX 9070XT only to discover your i7-4790K processor from 2014 is wheezing like an asthmatic sloth trying to keep up. It's like strapping a rocket engine to a shopping cart and wondering why you're not breaking the sound barrier. The CPU whispers "bottleneck, dude" as it struggles to feed data to your $1000 graphics card that's sitting there at 15% utilization, contemplating its existence.

The bear vs wolf meme perfectly captures how system requirements have evolved over time. Modern AAA games demand absurd hardware specs (RTX 5090, 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD) while the original DOOM from 1993 will happily run on a potato with two wires sticking out of it. The title about "running it in GitHub Actions" is the chef's kiss - some dev figured out how to bypass buying a gaming rig by abusing CI/CD infrastructure to play games on company hardware. Classic developer resourcefulness. Your DevOps team hates this one simple trick!

That 6900 XT isn't running hot. It's practically achieving nuclear fusion. At 93°C minimum and 95°C max, this GPU is doubling as a space heater, toaster, and potentially a small sun. The best part? The system tray showing 42°C CPU temp like it's perfectly normal to have your graphics card operating at temperatures that could cook an egg. Somewhere, a data center admin is having heart palpitations just looking at this.

The expectation vs reality of reviving ancient hardware with Linux is just brutal. Top panel: "Linux will breathe new life into your Jurassic-era netbook!" Bottom panel: "Oh, you wanted to actually use software? How adorable." Every modern development tool, IDE, and even basic apps giving you the middle finger with compatibility issues. That 32-bit processor might as well be a museum piece trying to run today's 64-bit world. It's like bringing a spoon to a gunfight and wondering why you can't shoot anything.

So your fridge is running Noctua cooling fans? Guess your ice cubes compile faster than mine. That's what happens when your household appliances have better hardware than your development server. Next thing you know, your toaster will be running Kubernetes while your production environment is still on a Raspberry Pi from 2012.