
Hey guys, remember this thread? Remember building PCs? I haven't done it in over seven years, so I wondered if I still would, but it turns out it's like riding a bike. Well, a bike with a few new technological advances since the last time I rode one; I'd never installed an m.2 drive before, but that wasn't too difficult (apart from the tiny screw which was a nightmare).
I kept my same case and power supply, and I'm going to hang on to my 1070GTX until raytracing cards get better (I think it's got a couple of years left in it), so I just did a CPU/mobo/RAM/SSD upgrade. I went from a nice 2012-era midrange i5-3570k, 8GB of DDR3 and a 250GB SATA SSD to...
CPU: Ryzen 3600
RAM: 16GB of DDR4 3200MHz, Crucial Ballistix Sport LT
Motherboard: MSI B450M Mortar Titanium (because how often do you see a silver motherboard?)
SSD: Intel 660p 1TB NVMe
And the rest of the stats:
GPU: MSI 1070GTX
Power Supply: EVGA... 750W, I think?
Case: Coolermaster... something with a window in it, gosh I don't know any more
HDDs: Just some old ones I've been using forever
I also replaced my CPU cooler for the first time since 2008, if you can believe it. I'd been using a Thermalright Ultra Extreme, and I would have kept it but I just couldn't find a new mounting kit to adapt it to the AM4 socket, so the old girl gets to enjoy her retirement and I get to see what this neat Noctua push/pull thing can do.
I did all this in anticipation of a little game coming out in April next year you might have heard of, and I took advantage of a glitch on eBay UK that allowed me to buy eBay gift cards at around 18% off, and then combine those gift cards with normal eBay 20% off promotions to get just disgusting deals on everything (I paid $200 Australian for the Ryzen CPU, which is like $140US). Honestly getting such good bargains was way more enjoyable than actually having a new PC 