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This weekend’s activities will include a live tweeting of my new PC build. All of the parts are here except for 5 case fans and my TPM chip. This will happen either later today or tomorrow. (Fans arrive tomorrow, so might wait for that. We’ll see.)
Ok, I decided not to wait for the case fans! (They& #39;ll be easy to install tomorrow.) Let& #39;s get building! First things first, I am gonna prep my work surface. I bought a @GamersNexus mod mat for this. Not b/c I needed it, but I wanted to support them as repayment for great info
Case! I decided on the Fractal Design Meshify C. Reasons: 1) Good airflow and cooling. 2) Nicely sized mid-tower that won& #39;t eat my desk. 3) Tasteful blackout design. 4) They offer w/glass OR metal side panels. 5) I am pretty anti-RGB, and so is this. 6) Only $60 on sale @ NewEgg!
First impression is fantastic. Thumb screws, all pieces are finished nicely w/no sharp edges or flimsy plastic in obvious places, consistent color. Cases were always the weak point of PC builds 20 years ago. Good ones cost a fortune. I can& #39;t believe this was $60!
The thoughtful touches are appreciated too. Easily removable and cleanable filters are such a quality-of-life improvement for a case that is essentially a carefully engineered sieve. My main criteria the whole time was "quiet and cool", a hard balance to achieve.
I& #39;m going to build as much out on the desk as possible before installing into the case, because it& #39;s much easier that way. So let& #39;s start with the motherboard. I went with the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro w/WiFi. Another part that isn& #39;t trying too hard to be XTREME, thankfully.
These slots right here are why I went for an X570 board instead of a B550. 3x true PCIe x16 slots is futureproofing for me. Many other boards have the full sized slots, but electrically they& #39;re only x8, x4, or even x1. That& #39;s...not great. I also wanted WiFi 6 onboard.
A big reason for choosing Gigabyte over ASUS or others was that they had a much bigger list of supported 32GB RAM that was validated for 4-DIMM use. I picked up this 128GB G.SKILL kit that is validated w/this board for 3600Mhz speeds. Really reasonably priced, too!
CPU is sorta temporary. I picked up a Ryzen 5 3600 because it was on sale. This is temporary, because this system was built the with Ryzen 9 5950X in mind. Once I can get my hands on one, I should be able to sell this for most of it& #39;s "New" price w/o a problem.
The candidate boot drive is an old Micron 7100 MAX I have from other Enterprise projects that have long wrapped up. I know more than enough about storage to think that I need an PCIe Gen 4 SSD for OS and app launching purposes. I have a separate NVMe for VM/data duties.
I say "candidate" because it hasn& #39;t been powered on in YEARS, which might render it unusable at this point. Contrary to popular opinion, NAND does not retain data forever w/o power, and if important info is lost, the controller might not work. Check out the PLP hardware tho!
Next up, thermal paste and heat sink. I& #39;m just using the thermal paste that came with the cooler here, because the good stuff I bought is waiting for the 5950X that& #39;ll be coming later. I went for the "Messy X" pattern. 
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Allow me to introduce you to my Large Adult Son, the & #39;Be Quiet!& #39; Dark Rock Pro 4. I went with aircooling b/c I doubt I will overclock, and the Dark Rock Pro had enough clearance for my RAM of choice, (only a couple of mm, but I only need 1!)
CHONKY.
CHONKY.
FYI the thread isn’t done! Build resumes tomorrow with the power supply, video card, additional NVMe drive, and case fans. Then some testing and burn-in!
Ok we’re back! In goes the GPU, an MSI Radeon 5600XT. Much like the GPU, this is meant to be temporary and I plan on selling it once I can snag a 6800X or 3080. I don’t mind losing a few dollars if it means it get good use for a few months.
Here’s the data drive. Much like the 7100 MAX I am using for boot duties, this is a 2.4TB Micron 9100 that is old and retired from enterprise duties, but still packs a lot of I/O horsepower because it was meant for datacenter duty.
