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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'll be easy to install tomorrow.) Let'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'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'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'm going to build as much out on the desk as possible before installing into the case, because it's much easier that way. So let's start with the motherboard. I went with the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro w/WiFi. Another part that isn'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're only x8, x4, or even x1. That'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'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'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'm just using the thermal paste that came with the cooler here, because the good stuff I bought is waiting for the 5950X that'll be coming later. I went for the "Messy X" pattern. 
Allow me to introduce you to my Large Adult Son, the 'Be Quiet!' 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.
