My First PC Build

This is my first ever PC build. Been working in IT for a while but never got around to building a PC until now. Was previously using basic laptops and a MacBook Pro from ~2017 which were usable but not great for gaming. Made this for gaming, personal coding projects, and messing around with Linux, VMs, and sysadmin stuff. Budget was $800, was willing to go a bit higher but actually ended up bit lower. All parts except GPU were purchased new. CPU/Mobo/RAM were a Micro Center AMD bundle, with 32GB DDR5 added instead of the single 16GB stick.

Mobo seems decent, although it interestingly still has VGA and PS/2 connectors that I probably won't ever use. I liked the Fractal Pop Mini Air case. Fits the microATX mobo great and is a bit smaller than a regular mid-tower so it doesn't leave a bunch of wasted space for the PCIe slots that aren't there. The build quality seems a bit better than other cases I was looking at too. It was pretty easy to get everything in, although wiring the rear fans was a bit tricky with the limited cable lengths and I ended up just daisy-chaining the cables to the front fan, which then plugs into the mobo so the cables are a bit sloppy. The fans are RGB but I currently have them set to solid white for now. I'm not using the 5.25" bay on the bottom front which is covered by a kinda finicky magnetic cover, but there's some extra SATA HDD/SDD trays down there which are nice.

So far the Radeon 6700 XT has been great, I've been playing Death Stranding with maxed settings on my 4K TV which is way better than what my old laptops could handle, and of course older games also run great maxed out. Haven't really tried anything newer since I didn't think my laptops would handle it very well.

Should be a good PC to upgrade in the future with AM5 and a newer GPU when the time comes.