B/ A new pc at long last

My last PC had a good run. It was quickly built on the fly for University out of cheaper parts and it lasted for almost 8 years. And that included some hefty 3-day long rendering sessions too. A few upgrades kept it from falling too far behind but once that started to show signs of wear, I finally decided to build a brand new one!

What did I buy? 

When building a PC, performance isn’t necessarily the thing I care about most. It’s important, but thermals and acoustics are something I value even more. And so I decided to build a more reasonable PC to ensure I could keep both of those things down.

The case is a Corsair 275R Airflow edition in white. A smaller space to build in but nothing I felt would hamper anything, but it also has plenty of room for airflow and cooling. This is coupled with a Corsair RM 850 Watt power supply, more than what I need, 3600 Mhz Vengeance Pro RAM (16GB of it), and AMD Ryzen 3700x powering the entire thing. This was placed in an X570 Aorus Elite from Gigabyte.

Buying some of these parts was down to research, and the rest was down to past experiences. I’ve always had Gigabyte motherboards, I’ve always had Corsair power supplies, and they’ve not steered me wrong yet.

The initial build

I was still waiting on a good deal for a graphics card and CPU cooler, so the first build was a simple, clean build with the stock AMD Wraith Prism cooler and my old MSI 1050 Ti. I spent a while making sure the cable management was up to scratch, and I quite liked it. It operated quietly and cold.

Getting a graphics card! 

I think anyone building PCs knows how rough it is to get a graphics card. I signed up to so many stock alert websites, following Twitters, joining Discords, just to get anything not ridiculously over-priced. I saw a few cards pop up but I wanted a better model than the ones I was seeing.

Fortune struck when the card at the top of my list popped up for around MSRP. I purchased it within about 10 seconds and as soon as I checked out the 10+ in stock alert went down to ‘out of stock’. But here it was, an MSI Gaming X Trio 3060 Ti. Reviews had said this beast of a card, being so big, ran quietly and cold, with a dual-bios for a quiet mode whenever needed.

The finished build!

As soon as I grabbed this, I also picked up a Noctua NH-D15 for cooling my CPU. If I was going to upgrade my PC, may as well upgrade all of it at once! The NH-D15 is known for being among the best and without any intention to overclock my 3700x it seemed like more than enough. And I prefer the simplicity and longevity of air cooling.

And there it is!

I moved some of the fans around and adjusted their speeds, I added some custom white cables for the PCIe and 24-pin connecter, and then adjusted the RGB of the different components inside and the build was completed. And I think it came out really well!

I do want to eventually upgrade the fans further and have a full Noctua rig, as well as upgrade the PC case eventually, but for now I can play modern games like Cyberpunk 2077 without issue and that’s enough for me!