The New Gaming PC

She is built, she is running, and she is a BEAST.

If you’ve been following the saga, I have been on a quest to update my gaming PC. Three years ago, I bought a Ghost Canyon Intel NUC, and slapped in a wickedly over-priced Nvidia GTX1660 GPU. That cart was originally released in 2019, and while it was above the mid range when released, it was definitely showing its age.

My first plan was to buy a larger case that could hold a standard form factor GPU, and while it worked, it was far from optimal (the cooling was just not there for it). I had a brand new $800 GPU, and nowhere to use it safely.

So, I closed my eyes, opened my wallet on Newegg, and pieced together a new desktop system for gaming.

I ended up with an NZXT case, Corsair 850W power supply, a Gigabyte X670 motherboard (AMD AM5 socket), 64G Corsair RAM, 2 2TB NVMe drives, an AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPU, and a Corsair AIO liquid cooler for the CPU.

The price was not too bad (NGL, it wasn’t cheap, but it was far less than buying another performance limited NUC), and yes, I could have economized on the RAM and the storage. But, since I also use this PC for recording music, I didn’t feel too bad stretching the budget for it¹.

All week the components were arriving, and Thursday afternoon, the kit was all together. I planned on Friday being build day, I took a half day off of work, and cleared the kitchen table.

Some observations:

1. If you use a configurator like they offer on Newegg, you really will struggle to select components that are not well matched. As you add motherboard, CPU, memory, GPU, and other odds and ends, it tallies the power consumption, so that you can select a power supply that is capable of handling the load. This has become critical in the modern era where GPU’s can slurp up to 500W of power.

2. Modern motherboards have beaucoup connectivity. The one I bought has 13 USB ports, a ton on the back of the computer, but also ample interior USB connectors.

3. Modern cases come without power supplies. In the dim distant past I would buy a new case that came with a standard power supply². That was always good enough. Now though, there are low noise power supplies, with modular connectors so that you only need to plug in what you will use, and not have this dangly rat’s nest of power connectors

4. Modern cases are also built to showcase the design. Clean routing designed in for cable management. No CD/DVD drive slots, and no natural place for 3.5” spinning rust disks³. There are two places behind the back plate to attach two 2.5” laptop form factor drives (you can get up to 4TB of storage in one of these for a puny $220 or so - WOW).

5. Everybody and their mother has color shifting LED’s built into it. The fans in the case, the fans for the cooler, the water cooling block, all flash the bling bling. I will admit that it is a bit jarring.

6. This is the first build I have ever done that I didn’t need a bandaid during. The old cases were made with stamped sheet metal with edges that are strategically designed to tear into your flesh, leaving you with a bleeding wound. While the last case I built into (circa 2009 for a purpose-built PC⁴) was good quality, but I looked like I tangled with an axe murderer after assembling it. This time, not a single drop of blood was shed. Impressive

7. I bought a fresh copy of Windows 11 on a flash drive, and the installation was blissfully easy. The days of spending days fiddling with the bits and bobs to get a well performing system are long gone. Thank God for that. In the 90’s I often installed the OS 2 or 3 times because I made some mistake in the initial configuration, and the only way to fix it was to re-install.

8. When I first logged in with my Microsoft account, it informed me that my old machine’s configuration was backed up when it last started. I was able to “claim” that, and voila, all my local connections, settings, and software was magically installed and configured. I expect this from my experience with Apple, but it is nice to see that Microsoft has stepped up their game to make generational upgrades painless.

9. I fear looking at my cable internet account. I probably installed 600GB of data over the internet since yesterday afternoon. Fortunately, we pay the few extra bucks a month to get unlimited data from Comcast. Phew.

All in all, while I struggled a bit with the cabling, and two of my fans are not supported on the iCUE system (they came with the case) everything plugged in and worked perfectly out of the box. The cooler cools, the fans spin (and flash LED’s), all the drivers are installed, bluetooth works great, and while I am plugged into gigabit ethernet, the motherboard has built in WiFi, with external antennae for the latest WiFi 6E.

Initial Thoughts

First, this thing is a beast. 8 cores, 16 threads, it just tears through the work. I did some CD ripping into Flac files, and wow.

I fired up Forza Horizon and let it auto-calibrate the settings. It now runs glass smooth at 2K resolution with all the setting at high. The game is rock solid at 60 FPS, and the GPU is barely breaking a sweat at about 40% of its capability. The old system it was 99% and we were at low settings, a huge difference.

Second, it is painful to find and install all the little programs that I had. I am not done, but my primary list is complete, and as time goes on, I will reinstall the various applications I used.

Third, the LED’s take some getting used to. The programs to control them are wonky and non-intuitive. Or my brain is broken and I just don’t get it. More to work on.

Fourth, this is the cleanest assembly I have ever done. I have watched creators on YouTube who make epic themed builds, going to the lengths of fabricating custom cables so that there is nothing out of place. I am not that anal retentive, so this is likely as good as it gets. Fortunately, the case makes it easy to hide any of the messy bits. And did I hide it.

I do like it. It is much bigger than the NUC, but it is also a ton more powerful. The NUC served its purpose, but now it is time to dive into the deep end. And it was an easy dive. I shouldn’t have been hesitant to do this a few years ago⁵.

1. That’s my story and I am sticking to it!

2. The era of beige box PC’s was a dark time. The cases were cheap, and frankly us hobbyists wouldn’t spend any extra dollars for elan

3. I really love this era of solid state storage. Sure, spinning rust disks are cheaper, but the convenience of the chip storage is just unparalleled. I have a Synology NAS for the massive “near” storage that is adequate. Spinning rust inside a computer just feels so primitive.

4. At the time, I was working as a product manager for the RightFAX product, and the ability to run VMware Workstation, and to spin up VM’s with different configurations was key to my job, so a fat Intel Core i9, 24G ram, and the YUUUGE (for the time) 2TB of disk was amazing. I still have that in my attic, the system is probably worth $25 *maybe*

5. Well, 3 years ago the GPU market was fucked. All the new cards were being snarfed up by Crypto Bros, and a current generation card would have set me back more than the entire build of this system.

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