Published May 14, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT His love of PCs and their components was born out of trying to squeeze every ounce of performance out of the family computer. Tinkering with his own build at age 10 turned into building PCs for friends and family, fostering a passion that would ultimately take shape as a career path.  Besides being the first call for tech support for those close to him, Ty is a computer science student, with his focus being cloud computing and networking. He also competed in semi-pro Counter-Strike for 8 years, making him intimately familiar with everything to do with peripherals. The PCIe slot is one of the longest-running pieces of consumer PC hardware still in active use. The card-edge connector you'd find on a brand-new RTX 5090 is mechanically and electrically compatible with cards built for PCIe 1.0 back in 2003—over 20 years ago.…