Big Char

My first desktop PC was an insanely overpriced Alienware prebuilt (please don't crucify me, I was 12) that I got when I was in middle school. It was extremely heavy, had terrible airflow, and generally gave me a whole heap of issues during the like 7.5 years that I had it. Even though it was clunky, I'll always love my GTX 1070 for lasting so long and giving me many unforgettable gaming memories, from the Halo series, to Metro, to Resident Evil. Needless to say, I was long overdue for an upgrade, and with working part-time in college I was able to finally build my first PC and it was a blast. I used to primarily play older games like around 2012 to before, always at 1080p 60hz max. For this build I wanted to make the jump to 2K or 1440p and shoot for a higher refresh rate at at least the 144hz mark. I also wanted water cooling and plenty of fans that I could control to optimize airflow, without having rainbow vomit RBG everywhere (although I see and respect everyone's colorful builds). I've been wanting to build my own PC for years, but after buying the Dead Space remake on steam and having it be borderline unplayable on the lowest settings, I knew it was time for an upgrade. I've stress tested my build with Dead Space, RDR2, GTA V, Metro Exodus, No Man's Sky, and even some Half Life Alyx and couldn't be happier with my target performance. Having started with a 500GB HDD in middle school and eventually maturing into a digital hoarder, I was super happy knowing I could take advantage of my MOBOs 3 M.2 SSD slots, and the added SSD and HDD bracket hidden in the back of my case. Microcenter's bundles made building my PC a breeze, and the only thing I did have trouble on was my GPU. I know there's a lot of discourse regarding Nvidia's 4000 series and their VRAM, but with the market stabilizing a bit after everything, I felt glad at the end of the day with my choice. Performance wise I couldn't be happier. Super fast bootup and processing times, access to DLSS and ray tracing, and an insane boost in quality and frames compared to my old 1070 make using this PC night and day. I picked up a 1440p 165Hz LG UltraGear monitor and WOW; for the price I spent (which was way less than I spent on my prebuilt back then) the performance was great. I feel set for the foreseeable future, besides replacing my AIO in 5 years or inevitably buying more storage and drives. Besides that, there's not much else. The case and build went really smoothly, and I did get confused at some parts but I worked it out (such as forgetting to remove the plastic sticker on my CPU cooler...or not removing the grate my AIO radiator attached to for easier screwing). Overall I'm very happy, and using an unlocked "k" intel CPU finally let's me enable XMP and get the most out of my RAM (6000MHz!).