I think it's been pretty obvious the past few weeks or months that I've been doing a lot of playing about with AI in the context of how scammers would use it and how to spot it. My PC has been great for what it is, and that's a system designed for productivity. I'm not a gamer, and even if I was I already have a PS5 to play games. My PC was for work and work alone. Messing with AI software though showed me that I needed to do an upgrade if I was going to take it seriously. Thank goodness Christmas and my birthday are fairly close together as I can buy something fancy for the both of them. This year I bought a new motherboard and case/PSU. My system was a SFF system, or a "half height" one to explain it simpler. With an SFF you're limited in what graphics card you can use due to both the physical space you get and the fact the power supply for an SFF tends to be much smaller/less powerful than a full sized one. The last computer I built was about 8 years ago and had a 500 watt system in it. The SFF I bought to replace it has a 180 watt system. Suffice to say you can't put anything particularly power hungry in it. So I ordered a new motherboard and case with PSU. The processor/memory/storage from the old system went into the new one, so it was essentially the same system but in a more upgradeable case. Next up I ordered a new graphics card. AI apps tend to rely on the graphics card rather than the processor, so an upgrade would make things faster, and boy did it speed things up! Face swapping suddenly went from 60-90 seconds to around 10-15 seconds. It's a huge jump, but you would damn well expect it to be after forking out around £300 just for the graphics card! To put that into perspective, my entire previous system cost me £450 so just one component cost me 2/3 the price of the entire previous system. My oldest friend - who I've known for 40 years now - can have the older graphics card in his system to boost his up. I bought the best graphics card my old system could take for it, so it's still a good upgrade but no good for me anymore. That way we do some trickle down upgrades. He's happy, I'm happy, I get to mess some more with AI and can put together faster "real time" demonstrations. Everyone's happy! Well, except the scammers whose tricks I plan on exposing even more this year. Sucks to be a scammer, right?
