the fallback plan
by George Posted on: 3/13/2025
Build Description
this gaming build was several months in the making and is ultimately a record of human adaptability in the face of repeated failure and frustration. for me, my initial motivation was to buy an nvidia 5080 or 5090 graphics card at launch. spectacular fail. then, i looked into the amd 9000 series cards. even if i got past my reservations about amd's graphics driver support, i couldn't buy one of those cards today if i wanted to. ultimately i decided the 20gb-24gb range of vram was not going to be realistic for me. what settled on was the 16gb. so far i have no problems playing the new game avowed on game pass at 4k and ultra settings.
Favorite Feature
all bitterness aside, there's a lot of features i've come to really appreciate about this most recent build. i'll name one thing i learned recently as an example. from what i understand, the new usb 4/0 io technology is standard among all x870 and x870e motherboards. so this is the first time i've had usb 4.0 to use. what i didn't know until recently is that all of my older devices that connect by thunderbolt 3 can be fully compatible when connected over usb 4.0. this is great for me because for example i can use my thunderbolt3-only wd black game dock to significantly expand my ssd storage and connect a bunch of additional usb and display io ports. so basically if a motherboard has usb 4.0 like the x870 elite, then it's not worth paying extra for extra io ports because it can be easily expanded.
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X Raphael AM5 4.5GHz 8-Core Boxed Processor - Heatsink Not Included
Qty: 1
$259.99
Gigabyte X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 AMD AM5 ATX Motherboard
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$279.99
XFX AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT Speedster SWFT 210 Dual Fan 16GB GDDR6 PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card
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$529.99
TeamGroup T-Create Expert 64GB (2 x 32GB) DDR5-6000 PC5-48000 CL34 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit CTCED564G6000HC34BDC01 - Black
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$169.99
NZXT H5 Flow RGB (2024) Tempered Glass ATX Mid-Tower Computer Case - White
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$119.99
MSI MAG A750GL PCIE5 750 Watt 80 Plus Gold ATX Fully Modular Power Supply - ATX 3.0 Compatible
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$99.99
amd am5 stock air cooler
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$0.00
2tb samsung 990 evo
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$140.00