I forgot how fun it is to build a PC

My new custom built pc is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 8 core processor
There is 16 GB of Gskill DDR 4 ram 2 8 GB chips.
The motherboard is an MSI X470 Gaming Pro board
I am running a 250GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD drive as well as a 1 TB WD Blue Drive for storage.
The video card is an MSI GTX 1080
The Audio is the high Def Realtek chipset on the X470.
The power supply is an 800 Watt Corsair Modular PSU
The case is the spectacular blue Fractual Design Super Quiet!

All in all the most surprising thing about this build was how quiet all the fans are even when the system is cranking away keeping FPS up high. There is 2 120MM case fans along with the mighty Prism Cooler on the Ryzen chip. There is also the dual fans on the GTX card and a fan on the corsair. That is a lot of air flowing, but its 3 times quieter than my 5 year old Asus Tower I had. Was this a big upgrade for me? IT was. The Asus was an Intel Core i7 3.0 GHZ CPU with 8 GB of DDR3. The GTX 1080 I had for the last 6 months and it worked well in that Asus. (I also got the card right before the price shot up due to all the Crypto Currency mining demand.) I wanted to have good gaming performance so I went high end on the GPU as that is bulk of the heavy lifting when it comes to gaming. I play Grand Theft Auto V and Forza Motorsport 7. Both visually stunning games with heavy GPU needs and a thirst for CPU cycles, both of these games have a stunning amount of detail to them. You will not enjoy them properly without the right hardware to keep visuals looking sharp. Building the new custom rig was a joy to me. I always loved building pc’s and I missed getting to do it on a regular basis. So I started with the graphics card and got the best one I could afford at the time. Then I started looking into CPU and motherboard combos and had to spend a lot of time deciding if I was going go use Intel again or check out the AMD offerings. AMD was always easier on the wallet but at times not always the best when it came to performance and heat dissipation. I liked all the Intel stuff I saw, the Coffee Lake CPU’s looked great. Everyone said you’re a gamer? Don’t bother with AMD! Just get the 8700 and you will love it. I really was leaning towards Intel. This was before the Ryzen 2.0 was announced. But then the Ryzen lineup was refreshed here comes the 12 MM CPU’s from AMD. And guess what, they include a heat sink and fan! I spent the next 2 weeks trying to read all I could about the new AMD stuff. Info was scarce no one had much info as AMD did not want to release anything before they launched.
So I set my calendar. I said let’s wait until the AMD comes out, give it a week then check out some reviews from the field. After that the new Motherboards started being released by all the vendors to support the new chips. I started looking at all those boards and options and finally decided on the 2700X 8 Core Ryzen and the MSI X470 Gaming Pro. I could have gone higher on the board but I do not plan on doing much over clocking, and I don’t need more high end features like Wi-Fi and USB C. They are both great, but I don’t use Wi-Fi on a desktop. I want the best online gaming experience and one small glitch from your Wi-Fi can mean the difference between taking turn 7 perfectly or being pushed into the Wall. Thanks to this well thought out designed case, putting all the components together was easy fun and there was a lot of room for nice clean cable management. A lot of cables can sit behind the motherboard tray and its easy to bend them into a nice clean design. (I still have the front cables to clean up yet but I have one more install to do. I did not realize how much motherboard design had evolved since the last build I did was about 12 years ago!

When did Fan ports go to 4 port? What is that USB connector? I don’t have one of those do i? These were some of the question s I had when I was reading through the Motherboard manual the night before. I always read them cover to cover to make sure I know what I am doing. Ok well this time, in the interest of time I skimmed a lot of the BIOS section. I just wanted to know how to set it on a good stable setting and leave it alone. This case also has a section on the back of the motherboard tray that you can mount an SSD Drive to it. I did not choose to do that as I wanted all the storage in the 3.5 bays in the front of the case.

I was very happy to test the Audio quality once I was booted into Windows 10. I also wanted great sound quality as I do enjoy a lot of music playback on my pc. I stream a lot of you tube clips and like to listen to my Satellite Radio on their web site. The sound is excellent and crisp and will go louder than is allowed in the noise ordinance section of the town code. Performance of this machine has been top notch. The PC boots up in less than 20 seconds thanks to the speedy SSD drive and the Gigabit Ethernet connection keeps me running laps with the best racers in the Forza Community! Performance has been ultra smooth with no glitches that I can see. Shadows and water looks great and realistic in Grand Theft Auto and standing at the Pier watching the sunset in game with the boardwalk behind you is memorizing and leaves you questioning which side of the screen you’re in.
Oh the Operating system is important too isn’t it? I am running Windows 10 with the latest updates. I had installed Windows 10 on this drive a while ago then put it away till the new build was ready. It booted right up allowed me to sign in and validate my copy of windows and everything came up with the settings it brought over from the previous pc. I was able to let it boot up and Windows took care of getting all the drivers in order to make sure it could boot and operate while it found the best drivers during the next update. I ran the pc for 3 days before I even remembered to check out the drivers on the cd and make sure I had the ones I needed. Of course I ran to the website and made sure to get the latest versions of drivers but I did install the CPU-Z that came with the board and I had a blast playing with the LED patterns in the Mystic light app. The LED lighting on the CPU and the Motherboard looks great and with the Window in the side of the case I get a nice colorful glow under my desk.

This has been a fun build and went pretty smooth. Building PC can be a lot of fun and rewarding, care just has to be applied to always be consistent how you build and be thorough in following install guides. Now if you will excuse me I need to practice running some laps on the Indy track..