· 3 min read

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.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU and Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER boxes

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
CPUAMD Ryzen 5 3600 (Overclocked to 4.10GHz)
GPUGigabyte GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB
Memory2x G.SKill Ripjaws 16GB v16 (3600mhz)
PSUCooler Master MWE Gold 750 W 80+
MotherboardMSI B450 Tomahawk Max
CaseCorsair Carbide 175R RGB
Storage (SSD)Patriot VPN100 512GB NVME SSD
Storage (HDD)Seagate Barracuda Compute 2TB
Peripherals
MonitorLG 34” UltraWide Monitor (34UM69G-B)
KeyboardRazer Cynosa Chroma
MouseRazer Deathadder Essential
DockDell 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:

CPU Fan in the upright position with all four ram slots filled.

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 / DateTimeSpySkyDiver
32 GB / May 5th6,28538,578
16 GB / May 1st5,91532,894

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.