Endless benchmarking. Hours upon hours, run after run. All in the name of seeing exactly one game performs on a range of different PCs. And I'd do it all again in a flash, as I adore benchmarking. Yes, I am a little odd.
On the other hand, I started to get headaches over the amount of BIOS/UEFI fiddling required to get the right balance between performance, power consumption, temperatures, and fan noise. Use the motherboard's default settings and the CPU just sucks up enough power to melt the polar caps; drop the limits down to Intel's values and you get top notch performance for a while before it throttles back.
No matter how experienced you are in doing something, you can still come across something new to trip you up Yes, it was BIOS flashing time. That solved the EXPO problem but not the inordinately long boot time, or a weird issue when the PC wouldn't cold boot if you'd shutdown Windows before and would only behave if the PSU was switched off and back on again. At one point I genuinely felt like I had totally lost the plot, but after fully resetting the BIOS and trying everything againIt looks great, runs well, and it's a cracking little PC. But hell's bells, what a journey to get there.
That was until it came time to swap the graphics card for another one. Cue endless black screens, wonky resolutions, missing drivers in Device Manager despite the fact they'd just been installed. And no, it wasn't a 'me' thing this time, as I was doing the same on an AM4 testbench, with a5 5600X, and that was rock solid. I can fling cards in and out of that all the time and it just works.Don't think I'm just dunking on AMD and praising Intel for the sake of it.