Core i9... Installed
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About
Core i9… Installed, also known by its official name "Specs," refers to a cartoon by webcomic artist Chris McCoy from his Safely Endangered comic series in which a yellow-colored person is installing expensive and powerful hardware into their personal computer or a robot in the original version. Online, the cartoon has been used as an exploitable and source material for memes, with the last panel often revealing the person using their PC for something that does not require expensive hardware. The meme format went through multiple iterations over the years, with its versions including 64 Core CPU and 128 Core CPU.
Origin
On August 1st, 2018, webcomic artist Chris McCoy posted a cartoon titled "Specs" in his Safely Endangered webcomic series.[1][2] The cartoon (shown below) depicted a person building what appears to be a powerful PC, with the last panel revealing that the person was actually building a killing machine. The cartoon garnered over 3,500 reactions and 860 shares on Facebook in six years.
Spread
On July 9th, 2020, the Instagram[3] page esportsdotnet posted the earliest found edit of the meme created by an unknown user. In the edit, the last panel of the meme was replaced with the person doing basic programming on the PC they built. The post (shown below) garnered over 10,000 likes in four years. On August 14th, 2020, Redditor biigsyke reposted the edit in the /r/pcmasterrace[4] subreddit, where it gained over 17,000 reposts in four years.
More edits of the meme were shared in the following years, with the meme format going through several iterations as hardware standards rose over the 2020s.
For example, on February 9th, 2023, an unknown Redditor posted a meme about poor performance of 2023 video games Forspoken and Hogwards Legacy on high-end PCs that gained over 8,900 upvotes in the /r/memes[5] subreddit in two years (shown below).
On August 8th, 2024, the Instagram[6] page hackersxm posted a version of the meme with the first panel recaptioned "Core i9… Installed," the latest iteration of the meme format as of early 2025 (shown below).
Multiple memes based on this version of the format were circulated online in the second half of 2024, primarily on Reddit.
Various Examples
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Search Interest
External References
[1] Webtoons – Ep. 382 – Specs
[2] Facebook – Safely Endangered
[3] Instagram – esportsdotnet
[5] Reddit – PC Gamers in 2023 be like
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