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Diamond is my wife's desktop machine, with a secondary role as a compute server. An Intel NUC7i5BNH, I got it in late 2017 (4 years ago), but it is starting to show its age. In particular, power management is starting to get flaky — sometimes it wakes immediately from hibernation — and the Bluetooth HCI shuts off power at random times, getting more frequent. This annoys my wife since she uses a Bluetooth mouse. While we could just install a $15 Bluetooth dongle and let the power management daemon just hibernate again when it's idle, we worried that Diamond would die on us, and with today's supply chain issues we could not get a replacement on short notice. So Diamond is getting replaced and upgraded when there's time to deal with procurement issues. The NUC7i5BNH will be kept in cold storage but configured for quick resurrection, hoping that it doesn't degrade just with the passage of time, in case a different machine dies suddenly.
So far the new Diamond is performing excellently. In my simple benchmark the CPU is about 2.5x faster than the old Diamond (SHA-512 1.4Gbit/sec vs 0.45Gbit/sec, NVMe disc sequential reading 8x (85Mb/sec vs 10Mb/sec). My wife is happy with it.
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