This will likely be the last large-ish tax refund I get. I last built a new-ish PC in March 2018, with a new GPU Sept 2018 (GTX 1070 Ti Mini), a CPU upgrade in July 2021 (i9-9900k), and a new GPU & PSU upgrade in July 2022 (RTX 3070 Ti & Corsair 850W modular PSU).
I put the 2018 build on my credit card, something I won't do again. Since then, I only upgrade if I've saved, or gotten a tax refund, or both.
The starting point for my 2018 build was an ITX system I purchased from my previous employer at the end of 2016. It was a fairly beefy shoebox proof-of-concept build (in a Silverstone SG06 case) that we'd done that was no longer required when we were acquired, and I swooped in before it was listed as an asset in the purchase and bought it.
I'd purchased the 1050 Ti in 2017. I'd seen it on special, got all ADHD impulsive and chucked it on the credit card as an upgrade from whatever I'd had before.
Because it was an ITX-based system, and I decided to re-use the existing case, this lead to some decisions that went on to bite me down the line. I had this vision of this tiny little ninja powerhouse of a PC, none of that silly RGB lighting, and damned if I was going to let things like reality or cooling to get in my way.
The first build problem was the USB 3.0 case header. I think for maybe the first time in any PC I've built (and there are a LOT), I mashed one of the pins on the motherboard, and it snapped off. It turned out that it wasn't necessary*, and the lack of that pin meant that the front USB ports were restricted to USB 2.0 speeds.
All up, it wasn't a badly performing system for what it cost me, and I burbled along quite happily for six months.
Then my kids bought me a second-hand Vive OG VR system for Father's Day in 2018; the 1050 Ti was really struggling and so I kept an eye on prices until I saw a ridiculously cheap (relatively!) Zotac GTX 1070 Ti mini that would fit in my little ITX case.
In November, as the weather was heating up, I realised the GPU was overheating. I assumed that it was just lack of cooling in the case, and bought a Corsair AIR 240, a mATX case with an acrylic window. I didn't want a windowed case, but I needed airflow, and I wanted a case that would still fit on the left hand side of the monitor shelf I'd hacked together from IKEA parts.
I transferred it all to the new case. I turned it on. The funky little Zotac card lit up. Oh? It has a light. Cool. Hadn't noticed it in the small case.
Turns out that the reason it was overheating was because some numpty had been playing with fan curves just after installation in Sept, and forgot.
My son had gotten himself a new PC in a Corsair case. It had a nice RGB strip up the front. The new case did have a window, after all. It wouldn't hurt to add a couple of RGB light strips, right? In May 2019, I started down a dark, yet colourful path. Then came the Corsair LL120 RGB fans in late 2019.
A couple of SSD & NVMe upgrades in 2020, then July 2021 saw an upgrade from 16Gb to 32GB of Corsair DDR-3200 RAM (with RGB, of course!) and the i9-9900k, as well as a new, beefier Noctua NH-L9x65 CPU cooler. Ugly as hell, but very quiet.
The Gigabyte Z370N WIFI is an 8th Gen motherboard, but was capable of using a 9th Gen chip with a BIOS update. In hindsight, I might have been better off upgrading the motherboard as well. It was a beefy little machine but was a little unstable.
Intermittently, everything connected via USB (and there were a LOT of USB devices) would suddenly disconnect and reconnect.
I picked up a ridiculously cheap Stream Deck XL on Facebook marketplace from a discouraged ex-streamer, and that was connected via USB-C.
The crashing seemed to get worse after installation, and during the troubleshooting process, the Corsair tech pointed out that the motherboard had a single USB root hub. EVERYTHING was effectively daisy-chained off that root hub.
In July 2022, with my savings and tax refund in tow, after many hours of research, I picked out the right RTX 3070 for me, and drove to Scorptec Clayton. A few minutes before I arrived, it occurred to me that I hadn't checked the vertical clearance on the card. The 1070 Ti's PCIe connector was on the top of the card, and was hard up against the acrylic window.
Turns out my carefully selected and budgeted card wouldn't fit into the AIR 240 case. It's a dual-chambered case, which reduces the height for coolers... and graphics cards. I spent 45 minutes sitting at one of the Scorptec demo systems -MASKLESS- checking every single card they had in stock, and finding literally ONE card that would fit. Which is why I spent about 30% more than I'd budgeted, and walked out with a RTX 3070 Ti and a new 850W PSU... and, as it turns out, COVID.
I'd gone straight from home, to there, and back afterwards, and developed COVID a few days later. Fun.
Anyhow, the 3070 Ti is a great card, and my PC was kind of beastly, but also... not? It would run out of grunt intermittently, would lock up from time to time. The USB thing drove me mad. It had two NVMe drives, two SSDs, two internal hard drives, as well as several external HDDs and SSDs. The Window 10 installation was crufty as hell, but I couldn't bring myself to do a clean install, because everything was set up just the way I liked it, and there's all those little things I knew I'd forget before wiping the SSD.
The upgrade itch was there for months, and I kept saving. Then I upgraded my son's PC for him, and... I knew it was time.
The thing is, I've built a VERY specific physical setup that I'm extremely happy with. I do not want to change it. The PC sits on the left hand side of my monitors, with a 24" 1080p monitor on a monitor arm, that I can put into portrait mode when useful. I have a pair of 32" QHD monitors. They're plugged into Zaphod (my gaming PC), and Heart of Gold (my work Mac mini), and I can swap inputs with the press of a button on the Stream Deck.
My monitor shelf got an upgrade not long after the monitor arms to a solid piece of timber (turns out IKEA shelves are hollow, and don't cope will with monitor arm clamps. Cronch.
The "new" shelf is 400mm (D) x 1800mm (W) solid oak shelf mounted on five IKEA adjustable legs (that are no longer available).
Also, I'd lost it with RGB and gone all in. The PC had to sit on the left hand side. It had to be windowed. It had* to be no more than 400mm deep.
I spent countless hours on Google, obsessively poring over cases, trying to find something suitable. I wanted a Corsair case again. I was reasonably happy with the AIR 240. It was designed to be used horizontally or vertically. The airflow was great, but the grills were awful dust magnets that were hard to clean.
I managed to narrow down a handful of options, and most of them were ruled out because they're just too deep for the shelf.
Which is how I ended up settling on the Lian Li O11 EVO Dynamic case... which is also too deep for the shelf. However, the design of the feet on the O11 mean that while it overhangs the front AND back, it still sits firmly on the shelf. It was also designed to be inverted (thus the "Dynamic" part of the name).
It's a twin-chambered case with incredible airflow, and a glass front and side.
Once I had a case, the rest was pretty much just assessing what was available, and trying to work out how "future-proof" to go with the build. The current Intel CPUs are the 13th Gen chips, which means the next gen will be a different socket.
I tossed up between 12th & 13th gen for a while, and Z690 & Z790 chipsets, but ultimately came down on the side of spending a bit more upfront, for a longer lifespan of the system.
However, that then brought improved cooling into the picture. The more powerful CPUs get, the harder they become to cool. I'm just not a fan of liquid cooling. I understand the principles, but I'm also incredibly wary of mixing liquid and electronics.
From the research I did, it appears I'd need a 360mm cooler for the CPU I chose, and that was a lot of extra money. For now, I chose air cooling.
I decided to jump up to 64Gb of RAM, having constantly found myself bouncing off the 32Gb on the i9 system.
I also needed another set of case fans, due to the mix and match set I'd collected over time.
Case: Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO.
Mobo: Gigabyte Z790 Gaming AX X
CPU: Intel i7-13700KF
Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A chromax.black CPU cooler
NVMe 1: Samsung 1Tb 980 Pro
RAM: Corsair 64Gb (4x16Gb) Vengeance Pro RGB (we'll... come back to this choice).
NVMe 2 was the primary drive in my previous build, partioned into C: and A:
*NVMe 3 WAS a Kingston NV2S/2000G that I'd ummed and ahhed over when it was super-cheap and I wanted more space on my previous system wanting to fill in the second NVMe slot six months ago. It's not like the terrible experience I'd had with Kingston in the past could be replicated, right?
It was replicated. The store gave me a full refund on my purchase price, which I immediately put towards the Samsung.
NVMe 4 was a 2Tb drive I had in an external NVMe enclosure because it was slow, but dirt cheap, which gave me some extra external fast storage (being about as fast as the internal 2TB SSDs).
The Lian Li is the most exquisitely designed case I've ever built a PC in. It's like the engineers who designed it thought of everything, and now I understand why people rave about Lian Li cases. It's a dual chamber case, but it's not designed like an average dual-chamber case. The PSU, HDDs and SSDs, sit behind the motherboard, but it's designed in such a way that the motherboard is effectively slightly elevated within the case. This means that there's a 40mm drop to where the case fans / radiator / or vertically mounted graphics card (!!) sits. Slots and grommets are in place allowing the power supply and SATA cables to come out right in front of the motherboard, making the black cabling almost invisible against the black case.
The cable-routing on this thing is unbelievably well thought out, and this is the cleanest PC build I've EVER built.
After building my son's PC, I wanted an ASUS TUF Z790 motherboard (I was raving about the brilliant industrial design on here), but in the few weeks between building his and mine, Scorptec seemingly stopped selling the TUF Z790, and given the budget interplay, the Gigabyte Z790 Gaming AX X was the next best thing. Not quite as design focused, but it's enough. They've also got a usable graphics card ejection lever; it's not as nice as the ASUS, but I've had to remove the graphics card several times, and it works.
I chose the i7-13700KF, because in 2018, I'd cheaped out and picked the i5-8400 to save money, and ended up regretting it. I hope the i7-13700KF is just a little more future-proof.
The Noctua cooler is superbly quiet, and does an excellent job of keeping the CPU cool.
The motherboard has six SATA ports and four NVMe slots.
Utilising all four of the NVMe slots disables two of the SATA ports, though, so always read your motherboard manual.
Another thing about the Lian Li case - it's the first case I've encountered that doesn't have a bunch of individual cables for the front panel. Just a single block connector. I don't know how long the motherboard to front panel pinout has been standardised (a LONG time), and plugging those damn cables in always pissed me off.
I brought over all of the Corsair RGB fans and cabling and the Commander Pro and Node Pro to drive it all, and this was where I made my first expensive mistake.
I had a mishmash of Corsair RGB fans that I'd collected on the previous rig, with three different versions of fan (LL120, ML120, SP120), and each one needs a separate channel for the RGB in the Corsair iCUE software, because each has a differing number of LEDs.
Also, I'd kind of just thrown them in the case with the idea of trying to get a rough balance of get cool air into the case, and getting the hot air out as fast as I could. It was a horizontal build, so two fans on the left were inlet fans, two on the front were inlet, two on the right-hand side were exhaust. The grills on the case means that they weren't super visible, so the visible lights on the exhaust fan were "enough".
The Lian Li case is all glass, and this is an inverted build.
The RGB fans are ALL clearly visible.
The GPU is at the top of the case.
Heat rises, but the GPU needs fresh air, so exhaust fans right above the cooling fans will create turbulence as they pull against each other.
Almost all of the fans had the LEDs on the front surface of the fan, which is only visible when they're being used for exhaust.
I went with my three existing LL120 fans and decided to buy a second triple-pack of LL120's.
After installation, I was going to use the two ML120's and the SP120 at the top of the case as inlet fans, until I realised that it was going to look ugly as hell, because they didn't match, and the SP120's LEDs would barely be visible due to the frame.
By this time I was deep into the build, and I was tired, and my ADHD impulsivity was barely under control.
I looked at what was available, realised that the QL120 fans would be perfect as inlet fans at the top, with dual LED rings, and off I went and bought them.
Got them installed, and I was finally happy...
... then I learned about positive & negative pressure cases, and what that (theoretically) does in terms of dust.
The theory is that negative pressure (more exhaust fans than inlet fans) means that dust gets sucked into the case through every little gap. Whereas with positive pressure cases (more inlet than exhaust), the pressure from inside the case means that less dust gets in.
For what I paid for the LL120 set, for $10 more I could have bought a QL120 set, & had good looking positive pressure.
This is one of the places building ITX systems for years kind of bit me on the arse.
This was my first real experience with speccing a DDR5 system. In my experience, all ITX motherboards I've worked with have two RAM slots. So I've (unintentionally) always gotten full speed out of my RAM.
I wanted 64GB, they had no 64GB 2x32 kits in stock, but they did have a 32Gb 2x16Gb kit in stock. I decided that 32Gb would do.
Assembled it, followed the recommendations of putting the RAM in slots 2 and 4, booted into the BIOS, and enabled XMP. Rebooted, BIOS again. RAM speed: 6000MHz! Ohhhh yeah. That's the GOOD stuff.
Installed Windows 11. While it was installating, I booted up my old Windows 10 PC (having cloned the NVMe) and immediately remembered why I'd wanted 64Gb; streaming build, multiple monitors, and Chrome is a RAM-hungry monster, that I frequently have open while gaming.
Back to Scorptec the next day, bought another 32Gb of RAM. Same brand, same model, same speed.
Start digging around and reading, and learned some hard lessons.
The reason for using slots 2 & 4 is that with two sticks of RAM, this is the fastest dual-channel configuration.
Slots 1 & 3? They're daisy chained. Using slots 2 & 4 puts the RAM at the end of the chain, and results in the lowest signal bouncing along the RAM path. In 1 & 3, the signals can be reflected, causing errors, and requiring the RAM speed to be reduced.
Also? XMP is effectively factory overclocking the RAM. It's actually only rated to 4800MHz. RAM being sold at 6000MHz has been tested to run with XMP turned on at that speed.
...as long as it's the only kit installed.
If I'd bought the two stick 64Gb kit, it would happily run at 6000MHz with XMP.
Sure, the aesthetics of the empty RAM slots would eat at me, but the system would run properly.
However, with two sets of 32Gb kits, not only does XMP not work*, the RAM actually gets downrated to 4533MHz. Apparently this is due to the signal reflection I mentioned earlier.
Seems a lot of high-end boards only have 2 RAM slots, and this is why.
That's a little frustrating. I might - technically - be within the returns period for the RAM, and may be able to talk to them about swapping the kits, but that feels like pushing things.
With a whole lot of fiddling around and reading and poking at the BIOS, I did manage to get XMP running with a specific profile, that's running all four sticks at 5600MHz.
I don't think that an extra 400MHz will have much of an effect on FPS, and the system is running fast and stable, so I'm pretty happy with things as they are.
So, finally, some photos. Firstly the back of the case. The irony is that behind the support panel with the SSDs mounted on it is some of the cleanest and best cable@management I’ve ever done. It took hours to route and cable tie everything, while in the bottom left corner are the CPU power cables which I just shoved into the gap because I was really tired and it was an awkward gap to work in.
@grissallia aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh you’re giving me the gaming rig builder itch. Not sure the bank accounts would like it at the moment, but the trusty i7-2600K is feeling a bit slow now…
@Jplonie@grissallia that’s the trick, it doesn’t! Well, ok, maybe it runs 3 or 4 copies inside electron apps, but not chrome the browser. Also, 16GB RAM helps
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