I got a new PC! My last system upgrade was from 2011, back when Witcher 2 was pretty much one of the most demanding games out. It’s an i7-6600 with 12Gb RAM and 2x ATI Radeon HD6870 in Crossfire. The OS is running off a puny 30Gb SSD that’s constantly running out of space due to Windows and the pagefile. While I’ve kinda been getting by on it for this long, but for the past few years I’ve had to endure stability issues, crashes, and I’ve had to remove one of the video cards to help keep the rig running without melting.
Basically, well overdue for an upgrade.
So being totally out of the loop for the last 9 years I went about picking parts that I thought sounded good at the time:
- Case – Thermaltake Versa J22 Tempered Glass Edition Mid Tower Gaming Case
- PSU – 80 Plus Gold Thermaltake Toughpower 750W
- CPU Fan – Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML240L V2 RGB CPU Liquid Cooler
- Case Fan – Thermaltake(CL-F038-PL12RE-A) Riing 12 High Static Pressure 120mm (12cm) Red LED Cooling Case Fan x3
- MB – MSI X570 GAMING PLUS
- RAM – Kingston HyperX FURY (HX432C16FB3K2/32) (Black) 32GB Kit (16GBx2) DDR4 3200 Desktop RAM
- CPU -Ryzen 3700X
- SSD – WD Blue SN550 (WDS100T2B0C) 1TB M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe SSD Solid State Drive
- HDD -Seagate BarraCuda 8TB
I was also just in time for the release of the 3080, but like most people’s experience the launch was a total nightmare with every PC store’s website melting on the day of release. So I subbed in an AMD RX570 so I could get the main PC first, and with a stroke of luck I also managed to land an RTX3080 a couple of weeks later by calling up some smaller PC shops in Melbourne and going for one of the cards with a smaller queue:
The mythical 3080!
Time to install the 3080 and transplant the RX570 into the old system
Hey, uh, that actually looks kinda cool
With an oldschool mindset from 2011, I didn’t really care for aesthetics, but somehow I ended up with a case with a glass side panel, and fans / RAM / GPU with RGB LEDs on them. And now I can kinda see the appeal of all these fancy PC builds now. I’ve actually turned the case sideways so I can admire the lights:
Of course now I somewhat regret not getting RGB fans for the front panels (I’m stuck with red). It’s gonna cost about $60 for me to replace them with RGBs and some elbow grease taking apart the front panel and radiator, but I think for now I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. If I were to get another PC in the future I’d probably pay a bit more attention to the overall aesthetics. Also yes, cable management, but I’m working with what I have here.
