Building my first PC

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#100DaysToOffload >> 2020-04-27 >> 003/100

While working in the lab for my PhD, I needed a good computer. It didn't need to be exceptional and though I did lots of biological and physics computation, I knew that GPU acceleration wasn't needed so that eliminated the need for complicated builds. I went with a NUC.

Two years ago, I started my homelab. All I needed was a relatively simple PC that I wouldn't mind leaving turned on permanently. I opted for a NUC.

Then I needed a PC I could use at home, either to do some more work or play some game. Not expecting great gaming results, I still chose a NUC.

Those "not great gaming results", I got! The 7i7 has a built-in GPU and games can definitely be played on it, but it struggled with reliability for competitive gaming. This year, that's all changing. I have built my own PC for the first time, not only allowing me to play games in a more comfortable way, this will also be my new work-at-home computer as well as being extremely performant for video editing and music mixing (thank you, foam-padded case!).

I opted for a AMD Ryzen 5 3600 on a Asus PRIME B450M-A motherboard paired with a AMD RX580 GPU. OS and software goes on an NVMe m.2 drive, games on a SATA SSD, data on a 2TB HDD. 16GB of DIMM DDR4 RAM.

My userbenchmark:

Man, I love team red.