[BuckRogers]

Same boat. I built in 2009 and have a Q9450@3Ghz and a Radeon 5870 with 8GB RAM and a one-time top of the line Intel 160GB X25-M SSD. Still works great. There's only 1 thing I don't like about it, with 3 monitor outputs enabled the idle temp on the GPU is pretty hot (~86C). I'm hoping a newer machine will bring that down. Single output it's about 57C, so a huge difference.

But I got tired of 190F slowly being pumped out of my case and into the room. Its replacement is finally on the way. I preordered Intel's Skull Canyon NUC[0]. Got 32GB of DDR4-2800Mhz memory and a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro PCIE/NVME M.2 SSD. I'll be dailychaining a single DisplayPort cable to 3 new LCDs as well.

Pretty huge leap in performance. It just made sense to stop building new computers and jump on the NUC bandwagon. All I do is development, League of Legends and the rare CSGo. The ~Geforce 750 performance levels that NUC will provide will be enough. The inclusion of the Thunderbolt3 port for an external GPU case really put my mind at ease. Not that I intend to utilize it, but I'm glad it's there. Same upgradability as any other machine. SSD/RAM/GPU. The CPU is soldered, but I never once replaced a CPU after building a computer anyway. Other than the few Athlons I killed from overclocking in ~2001.

Probably upgrade more often if these new gaming NUCs are as good as I think they'll be. Next upgrade for me will be 10nm + Thunderbolt4 NUC. And the final perk, all-Intel so it'll work great with any Linux distro natively. That's worth a lot to me.

Unless Intel failed hard with this thing, which I highly doubt.. it's Intel.. I'm all-in on NUCs from here on out.

[0]http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856102...