About every 2-3 years around the holidays I get a new PC. Most recently I've been buying Dell XPS machines (and modifying as needed), but given my recent experience this time I decided to go back to a custom build.
This post will summarize my build experience, parts used, and prices.
The quality of Dell XPS machines has been dropping and the value of buying is about on par with building currently. Also I had a couple of of extra parts (high-end power supply and graphics card) from a previous project that I wanted to put to use. I've also been wanting to use a Fractal PC case.
I already had these two parts:
GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC
I started with the case. I've been wanting to buy this case for a while so I finally did so.
Fractal Define 7 Compact - $114.99
It's beautiful, clean and was by far the best purchase for this whole project. Spacious but not too big. Easily fits a full-size graphic card. Really well designed for a PC build using standard parts. I bought this from NewEgg. I planned to buy all the parts from NewEgg but many of the parts had long delivery times or were backordered so I ended up buying most everything else from Amazon.
Processor. I went with a 14 Gen Intel.
Intel Core i7-14700K - $332.99
Being a "K" processor it can be overclocked, and I've had good luck with Intel in the past (I've never done an AMD build).
Motherboard. I just wanted something middle of the road. I went with:
MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk MAX WiFi Gaming Motherboard - $228
I bought an MSI laptop a few years back and it works great. The video card I had was also MSI. I feel the motherboard space is flooded with options, and probably any of many brands and options would have worked fine.
RAM. I wanted 64 GB, and I went with the Corsair brand. Also, no RGB (no RGB anywhere). I probably could have gone with less than 6400 MHz.
CORSAIR VENGEANCE DDR5 RAM 64GB - $204.99
SSD. Samsung. Always. I would have done the 990 PRO but they were out of stock. I also would have done the heat sink version, but the motherboard wants a flat SSD for the socket with cover panel, which claims to have some cooling effect.
SAMSUNG 980 PRO SSD 2TB PCIe NVMe - $179
CPU Cooler. I didn't want to mess with water cooling, although some of the modern kits look pretty easy to use. Like motherboards, this space is flooded with options. I've had decent luck with Noctua fans.
Noctua NH-D9L chromax.Black - $74.90
Installed the power supply and cables first, and removed miscellaneous extra 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch harddrive mounts from the case. Motherboard went in next. Then processor into the motherboard. The Noctua cpu cooler was next. This was the only difficult part of the assembly. The two nuts on the cooler seemed to be just a bit off from the two screws on the motherboard mount that they connected to. Also once the metal part of the cooling unit was attached, the fan would no longer sit flush between the two screws. To get it to sit flush I needed to file off part of the fan corner. The SSD went in next, and the lastly the giant video card.
The pc case came with two large Fractal fans, one in front and one in back. I added an extra Antec fan to the front.
The pc case came with good documentation in the box, and the motherboard had good documentation available for download from the MSI website.
I downloaded a fresh copy of Windows 11 Pro from Microsoft. See this article for how I do a clean install of Windows. I set the motherboard to boot from USB, and Windows 11 installed. I tried using the license key from the previous build but it wouldn't work, so I was propmpted to pay for an additional Windows 11 license ($199).
I have a Microsoft 365 family account, so I installed office and got OneDrive up and running. I keep I'll my personal files in OneDrive so they just come down to the new PC.
Next I installed the NVIDIA App (formally GeForce Experience).
I installed MSI Center for basic motherboard diagnostics. I also installed Samsung Magician for SSD diagnostics.
I updated the BIOS on the motherboard. All the drivers that automatically installed seemed sufficient.
Doing just normal work, the CPU stays right at about 31 degrees C, and the GPU is about 48 degrees C. PC is silent.
The motherboard defaults have things like "Intel Turbo Boost" and "Game Mode Boost" all enabled. These allow the motherboard to automatically overclock the CPU when it thinks it's needed. If you run the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility with these enabled, the CPU speed will go way up (5+ GHz) but the temp will also hit 90+ degrees C. Needless to say I disabled this nonsense. The processor has 8 performance cores running at 3.39 GHz and 12 efficiency cores running at around 2.59 GHz. Plenty of performance. Nice and cool. Nice and quiet.
The SSD stays right around 40 degrees C during normal work.
Boot time. I was expecting boot time to be fast, but apparently because the motherboard is complex, it adds about 16 seconds to the boot time. Not a big deal but disappointing.
CPU fan. Again this was a pain to install.
Windows 11 Pro. Hated having to pay for the OS again.
Bluetooth. Even though I'm not using WIFI I needed to plug in the WIFI antenna that came with the motherboard in order to get any range on the Bluetooth. And my Airpods work but not completely. Sound always works fine, but the microphone doesn't work with zoom (my camera mic takes over). And my Airpods won't work with MS Teams at all. And this is after hours of trying different things. They worked fine with my Dell XPS.
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Looks like my total hardware cost was $1134.87 (not counting the parts I already had). Other than the gotchas above, I'm pretty happy with the build. This is a super fast work PC, and I can also play the occasional game without issue.