$4K for 4K

After upgrading to a 4K, 144HZ monitor for accessibility purposes, I soon realized that my 6800 XT couldn't quite push the frames I wanted for games at 4K. I decided to upgrade my entire rig in order to get the absolute maximum out of the DDR4/Z790 platform for the next 5+ years.

I work heavily with Docker, Hyper-V/VMWare Workstation, and WSL - so 64GB of RAM is a necessity for me. Additionally, my i9-13900K gets put to great use in my professional workloads I handle at my employer. If I were just gaming, I probably would have saved a lot of money by going with an i5-13600K, a cheaper board, and more "optimal" choices - but I have specific use cases (such as a TPM for Bitlocker, even in the event of a BIOS update).

For compute performance: the i9-13900K wipes the floor of every other chip I've laid my hands on. Even compared to my old Ryzen 5 1600, my system feels like a completely new one. Everything is immediately so much faster to open, load, download, render, and process. A good reason for this is also due to my choice of storage - all PCIE 4.0 SSDs. For boot, I bought the (at the time) fastest & available 2TB M.2 SSD for my operating system + games. I considered a WD SN850X, but I've had reliability issues with my old SN850 - so I steered clear. The other three SSDs are cheaper SN750 SEs I got on sale for bulk storage/ISOs/VMs and my music library.

In games, my 7900 XTX also wipes the floor - even compared to my still-venerable 6800XT! I'm able to constantly achieve 190FPS (capped) in Apex at 4K competitive settings, and I imagine just about every other game I may want to play for the next few years will run excellent as well. I could have gone for an RTX 4090 for the maximum 4K performance possible, however, I refuse to support NVIDIAs practices and I've had bad luck with their drivers. This specific GIGABYTE model of 7900 XTX was chosen just because it was in stock around MSRP and runs cool. I never get above 75c at 100% load.

I went with DDR4 on Z790 mostly out of convenience: at the time - I already had a high-end 4000MHz CL15 kit laying around and I didn't want it to go to waste. This is also why I have the Corsair Vengeance fan over my RAM - that kit ran very hot. Unfortunately, my needs increased early this year, and I had to upgrade to 64GB of RAM. I took a tiny bit of a performance hit by getting slower RAM, but in the real world, it doesn't make a difference. If I were building everything brand-new at once, I would 100% go DDR5 now that the platform has matured a bit.

For Power Supply, I went overkill: I got a 1200W PSU, and ATX 3.0/PCIE 5.0 ready as well. While I don't plan on buying a 4090, having the ability to use 12VHPWR is nice. The RM1200X Shift is quiet, cool, and fits in my case. However, your mileage may vary when fitting it in your case - wait for more reviews and PCPP to verify compatibility.

For my case, cooler, fans, etc. - I went with about the best I could without having to go full water-cooling. The only reason I went full-ATX is just for convenience sake, but in retrospect I don't think I'd change to a smaller case since I'm not moving it around often.

All-in-all, I'm incredibly satisfied with my 4K gaming PC & workstation. PC building and repair is my hobby and has been for 10+ years - and now that I'm an adult I'm proud to call myself an enthusiast.