Back in early 2020, I had an Intel i7 based game system that had served me well for about 5 years. However, the system was showing it’s age and I knew I needed an upgrade. Since the new Covid 19 pandemic was forcing everyone to stay indoors as much as possible, it seemed to be the perfect time to upgrade my system, though I don’t really know why I call it an “upgrade” as it turned out to be a full replacement!
The system I built was a culmination of what I wanted, what I could afford, and mostly what was available at the time. The pandemic lock-down was still fairly new and I found myself right in the middle of the run on computer parts caused by everyone wanting to upgrade their systems. There are parts I wish I could have purchased, but it was not in the cards. I suspect everyone did the best they could at the time.
My system is simple enough. The motherboard is an ASRock X570 Pro4 with an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, 12-core CPU. I’m running 16GB of RAM, mostly because I haven’t found a need to add more. So far, everything I play fits nicely inside 16GB. Graphics are powered by an EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 with 8GB of VRAM onboard. The system boot drive is a 250GB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe M.2 SSD. The data disk is a 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 SSD. It’s all powered by a 650W Seasonic USA power supply and wrapped in a Lian Li case. I’ve got 2 blue 140mm fans mounted vertically, bringing cool air into the case from the back-side panel, and 3 blue 120mm fans mounted across the top of the case pulling heat out through the top. I’m still running Windows 10 for now but I’m not opposed to upgrading to Windows 11 in the future.
The system is pretty snappy for sure and handles everything I’ve asked of it, with no problems.
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