Building my own PC
With COVID-19 cancelling all my travel plans for the year, and finding myself with a lot more time on my hands I decided it was time to retire my old 2009 27” iMac.
I had already moved all my side project work onto my new Points work laptop (a 13-inch, 2018 MacBook Pro) so the reasons to keep the iMac were getting smaller and smaller. Epically when my new MacBook can out preform my iMac!
After a few years of attempting to game on it with Mac OSX Boot Camp it was time I joined the big leagues and built myself my own gaming PC. A perfect way to spend my first bonus from Points!
Parts
With the help of some colleagues at Points and lots of searching on PCPartPicker, I settled on the following part list here are the specs for my first gaming PC:
| Components | |
|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 3600 (Overclocked to 4.10GHz) |
| GPU | Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB |
| Memory | 2x G.SKill Ripjaws 16GB v16 (3600mhz) |
| PSU | Cooler Master MWE Gold 750 W 80+ |
| Motherboard | MSI B450 Tomahawk Max |
| Case | Corsair Carbide 175R RGB |
| Storage (SSD) | Patriot VPN100 512GB NVME SSD |
| Storage (HDD) | Seagate Barracuda Compute 2TB |
| Peripherals | |
|---|---|
| Monitor | LG 34” UltraWide Monitor (34UM69G-B) |
| Keyboard | Razer Cynosa Chroma |
| Mouse | Razer Deathadder Essential |
| Dock | Dell 6000 USB-C Dock |
The dock is super handy for connecting my MacBook to my monitor and for charging without a myriad of cables. It also mirrors my setup almost at the Points office which is convenient.
The Build
The build went well apart from one thing, after spending a few minutes working out why it wouldn’t post after I had finished building, I noticed I had wired the front panel connectors to the wrong connections on my Motherboard, so my start button wasn’t doing anything!
A day or so after I noticed that I had installed the stock CPU fan with the top AMD logo off by 90deg to the right. So while installing my second RAM kit, I took the time to rotate the fan 90deg to keep the AMD logo chunk at the top. Looking quite tidy now I think:
Benchmarks
I ran 3DMark’s benchmarks initially a week or so after building just before deciding to order a second RAM kit hence the before/after RAM kit upgrades, no surprise that the 32gb was a bit better.
| Configuration / Date | TimeSpy | SkyDiver |
|---|---|---|
| 32 GB / May 5th | 6,285 | 38,578 |
| 16 GB / May 1st | 5,915 | 32,894 |
Next Upgrades
Probably not wise that I’m overclocking with a stock CPU cooler, I’ll be looking into an aftermarket one soon, potentially going to go for an all-in-one liquid cooler, but these might be a little overkill for my current setup and usage. One thing I am certainly going to buy soon is another SSD for games. My poor M.2 boot drive is under way too much usage with Steam games at the moment.