My New PC Build

Hero image credit: Barret Blake

Please note that the links to the various components use my Amazon affiliate link and I may receive a commission if you buy anything using those links

I used to build my own PCs every time. The last time, however, I bought an off the shelf PC from MicroCenter. It was fine, and it served me well these last 5 years or so. It’s been getting a bit long in the tooth of late, and I had a little bit of extra cash at the moment. Add to that the growing threat of tariffs that were going to make every single PC component skyrocket in prices, I decided it was a good time to invest in something for the next 5 years. But, I decided, this time I wanted to go back to building my own. So here’s what I ended up with.

Motherboard

The motherboard had to be top of the line. A lot of people discount it. But if it doesn’t keep everything talking well to each other, and give you the options for future expansion and growth, it’s going to hurt. As you’ll see with pretty much everything, I went top of the line. I knew I wanted an AMD processor, so I went with the best AMD board I could get. I picked an MSI X870E MPG Carbon WIFI. It had several features that appealed to me. First was the support for the latest AMD processors. Second, it had slots for 4 M.2 SSD drives. I wanted to go sans spinning disks, so that was important. And last, it had plenty of ports for everything else I might need. And I’ve never gone wrong with MSI boards. Seemed like a good base to start with.

CPU

As I wanted this to last for the next 5 years, I went with the absolute best AMD CPU I could get. In fact, it was released just 2 days before I bought it. I went with the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D Granite Ridge 16 Core CPU. It got great reviews and it wasn’t Intel. And being the top consumer CPU available, it was a no-brainer.

My last PC had a Corsair iCUE water cooling kit, so I decided to go that route for this build instead of the traditional fan. In fact, AMD recommends liquid cooling rigs for the Ryzen 9 CPUs. So I grabbed an iCUE Link Titan 360 to keep my Ryzen 9 running cool.

Graphics Card

This was a tough one, and the thing that made me delay for a month or two before pulling the trigger on all this. NVIDIA had released new cards at the start of the year, but they were obscenely overpriced, even at MSRP. Of course, you couldn’t find one at MSRP, just at the inflated scalper prices. So I waited. Then word came that AMD was going to release new cards. So I waited a little longer. And when they came out, great performance at prices cheaper than NVIDIA, I decided to go that route. Of course, they were sold out as well. So I waited a couple more weeks, watching all the sites for stock. And I finally found a 9070 card at retail. So I bought that one. I even paid for express shipping. And then UPS lost the package….

Well, they didn’t lose it per se. They just claimed it had been delivered when it hadn’t. So I started the claims process and went looking for another card. And I found one a couple hours later and bought that one and again paid for express shipping (different retailer, different 9070 card, but equivalent). And I thought, well, I’ll get my money back eventually for the first one… I hope…

And then what shows up at my house, 10 hours later…. A UPS truck with my missing card. sigh

Long story short. I ended up with two AMD 9070 cards. Thankfully, the second card was from Best Buy and once it arrived, it was relatively simple to return it to a local store and get an immediate refund for that one.

What I ended up with was the Sapphire Pure AMD Radeon RX 9070 Gaming card. I’ve never had a Sapphire card, but I like it so far.

SSD

I wanted to go all SSD drives for memory and started off with a pair of M.2 SSD drives. One was a Samsung 990 PRO 4TB and the other was a WD Black 4TB. They’re roughly identical in performance and the only reason I have one of each was that I bought them on two different days and I went with the one that was on sale each of those days. But 8 TB of M.2 SSD storage should be more than enough to hold all my code, my photos and videos, and an assortment of Steam games that I’m currently playing.

RAM

I found that 64 GB of RAM works well enough for anything I need to do, even if I need to run a couple VMs for coding purposes. I generally like the G.SKILL brand as I’ve never had issues with that. So I found a set that’s on the approved list for the MSI motherboard and grabbed a pair of the G.SKILL Trident Z5 Neo RGBs.

Power

To power the whole thing I ended up with an ASUS TUF Gaming 1200W Gold PSU. That led to a minor crises at one point during the build because the AMD 9070 graphics cards still use the older PCIe power plugs and the PSU didn’t have enough PCIe cords to supply the card, the motherboard, and the iCUE. So I had to track down adapter cables that converted the newer 600w cable plug to PCIe plugs. Surprisingly not that easy to find the right ones.

Case

I’m a sucker for cool looking cases. And I wanted something that wasn’t the standard tower this time around. And as I was perusing various sites for ideas, I happened on the Thermaltake Tower 600. A completely different look from anything I’d seen before. I can’t recommend this case enough. Every panel is easily removed to gain access to every side of the components. Everything is easily mountable in a vertical position. I have only one complaint. There isn’t enough space at the top for many of the cables to plug in to the motherboard and graphics card. It can be really difficult to manuver the cables in and get them plugged in, especially if you have big hands like me. Another inch of space at the top would have been much better. But that’s a minor quibble. It’s a really damn cool case.

Final Build

And here’s a few photos of the final result. I couldn’t be happier. It’s all running smoothly and so… incredibly… fast…