The Uni-Verse

This is my gaming, photo/video editing, schoolwork desktop. I play anything from competitive shooters like Valorant, to roguelikes like Risk of Rain 2 and triple-A action RPGs like the Witcher 3 (and currently Elden Ring). I like to record my gameplay on occasion, edit photos and videos for personal use, and no laptop I've used beats the snappiness of a desktop, even when it comes to word processing. And I needed something to support my horrible habit of using 50+ chrome tabs at once.

But, like many University students, I live in two places at once, and moving even a micro-ATX build around can be cumbersome alongside other items (including an e-bicycle); especially since I don't own a car and hitch rides with my roommates. So I decided to go SFF and build in the then available NCASE M1. And I could not have chosen better. The build process was barely more difficult than the midtower I built years before, with the only thing requiring significantly more effort being cable management. Further, the upgrade process has been smooth. This build started with an RX3600X, 1070ti, a 600W power supply, no GPU adjacent Noctua fans, 16gb of RAM, and only the M.2 drive. Over the past few years I've swapped out components here and there and it has been easy. Sure, I could have spent a bunch more and gotten a mini-DTX monster motherboard instead of my ASUS ROG Strix B450-I, and I could have waited for Ryzen 5000; but it would have cost me more, and waiting for the next big thing is rarely a good reason to hold off. This build, absolutely rules.