I considered building PCs a bit of a hobby from about 2001 up until 2012. Life happened, priorities changed, all of that fun stuff. So, after a really long hiatus and a good 3 years with a PS5 to keep me content gaming wise, I decided it was time to jump back in with the big boys and get something a little more powerful.
I spent the better part of two weeks researching and reading, going through build iterations on PC Part Picker. Finally, I settled on a build in the $2,500 range. I was going to need everything though, short of a monitor --although that will eventually come after I finish redoing my gaming room. For now, I’m using my 55" Samsung S95B QD-OLED TV and it’s doing nicely but I do worry about burn-in. Right now I’m eyeing the Alienware AW3225QF monitor to grab here in a couple of months, maybe catch it on sale. I can wait this one out honestly.
The STEALTH build
- Antec 1 FT Performance Full Tower Case
- Seasonic Vertex PX-1000 80+ Platinum 1000W PSU
- Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus WiFi Motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core CPU
- PNY Verto GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16GB
- 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 RAM
- Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD
- Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 AIO Cooler
- Logitech G515 TKL Wireless Keyboard & Logitech G502X Wireless Mouse
I tried to avoid RGB lighting as much as I possibly could, but it seems that it’s an almost impossible task these days. Fortunately, it’s not too gawdy and the only lights are on the memory, a small spot on the mobo and then the KB & Mouse. The latter two are beneficial though so they don’t bother me at all.
The only thing I’m really having trouble with is figuring out all of the new performance and overclocking features of modern hardware. Man has A LOT changed. It used to be so much simpler just tweaking voltage, front side bus speed and multipliers. It feels like you practically have to have a degree to be able to maximize performance on these new PCs! If anyone has any suggestions or guides for my specific setup that would be awesome. I’ve been looking around now that everything is assembled, and Windows 11 is installed.
It’s the HDMI cord, and yes, it is braided. Zeskit Maya HDMI 2.1 to be exact. Fit the specs, it’s reviewed well, and it’s not ripping me off by costing more than any digital signal interface should. I still don’t understand why anyone would ever pay more than $20 for an HDMI cord, unless you’re running some crazy distance that requires active power for repeaters or something.
I had originally intended to place my PC further away than it is presently, so now I’ve got this 10ft long cord when a nice little 2-3ft would have sufficed. Oh well, at least I can move it around the room if the need ever arises. I’ll likely have a monitor and proper desk before that ever happens though. You all should see the “desk” I’m using. It’s for people that ride exercise bikes, but it actually works very well for how I’m using it. My only complaint is that it was $100 and it doesn’t provide a whole lot of space. I might return it and just get a proper desk, because once I do, I’ll really have no use for this thing.
Ah okay, super cool build then!
There’s a whole lot of data moving through HDMI cables when using 4k HDR, and 5.1 audio (even moreso when the audio is uncompressed). I spent $50 each for a couple of HDMI cables because the ones I was getting from Amazon kept overheating and dropping signal in the middle of a baseball game, and in the middle of playing Diablo 4 with my wife. So I went down to the store and bought the best ones they had. The problem went away completely. I’ll check out Zeskit Maya if I ever need another 2.1 HDMI cable.
