after using the almighty thinkpad t480 for a few months, i realized it just wasn’t capable of building large rust projects. my ram used to max out and system would freeze. i tried bumping the ram from 8gb to 16gb, and even put swap into the mix but still we were looking at 30+ minutes build time.

i finally decided to get new system. here are the specs:

image containing monitor, keyboard, cpu and lego figures

the whole thing cost me around $900. it took me 3 days to build and set up. i had to update the bios to apply the recent 0x129 microcode fix, which addresses an issue with 14th gen intel cpus running at too high a voltage. also, since i was using debian 12, whose linux kernel (6.1) doesn’t support these new cpus, i ended up distro hopping. you can read more about that here.

i tested same rust project as before. first clean build took about a minute, and subsequent builds were instant. it was worth it.

other than that, i already own few things:

i handed my old t480 down to my sister, so i’m no longer using it.

p.s. keyboard and speaker are gifts from my friends <3