This weekend’s activities will include a live tweeting of my new PC build. All of the parts are here except for 5 case fans and my TPM chip. This will happen either later today or tomorrow. (Fans arrive tomorrow, so might wait for that. We’ll see.)

Ok, I decided not to wait for the case fans! (They'll be easy to install tomorrow.) Let's get building! First things first, I am gonna prep my work surface. I bought a @GamersNexus mod mat for this. Not b/c I needed it, but I wanted to support them as repayment for great info

Case! I decided on the Fractal Design Meshify C. Reasons: 1) Good airflow and cooling. 2) Nicely sized mid-tower that won't eat my desk. 3) Tasteful blackout design. 4) They offer w/glass OR metal side panels. 5) I am pretty anti-RGB, and so is this. 6) Only $60 on sale @ NewEgg!

First impression is fantastic. Thumb screws, all pieces are finished nicely w/no sharp edges or flimsy plastic in obvious places, consistent color. Cases were always the weak point of PC builds 20 years ago. Good ones cost a fortune. I can't believe this was $60!

The thoughtful touches are appreciated too. Easily removable and cleanable filters are such a quality-of-life improvement for a case that is essentially a carefully engineered sieve. My main criteria the whole time was "quiet and cool", a hard balance to achieve.

I'm going to build as much out on the desk as possible before installing into the case, because it's much easier that way. So let's start with the motherboard. I went with the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro w/WiFi. Another part that isn't trying too hard to be XTREME, thankfully.

These slots right here are why I went for an X570 board instead of a B550. 3x true PCIe x16 slots is futureproofing for me. Many other boards have the full sized slots, but electrically they're only x8, x4, or even x1. That's...not great. I also wanted WiFi 6 onboard.

A big reason for choosing Gigabyte over ASUS or others was that they had a much bigger list of supported 32GB RAM that was validated for 4-DIMM use. I picked up this 128GB G.SKILL kit that is validated w/this board for 3600Mhz speeds. Really reasonably priced, too!

CPU is sorta temporary. I picked up a Ryzen 5 3600 because it was on sale. This is temporary, because this system was built the with Ryzen 9 5950X in mind. Once I can get my hands on one, I should be able to sell this for most of it's "New" price w/o a problem.

The candidate boot drive is an old Micron 7100 MAX I have from other Enterprise projects that have long wrapped up. I know more than enough about storage to think that I need an PCIe Gen 4 SSD for OS and app launching purposes. I have a separate NVMe for VM/data duties.

I say "candidate" because it hasn't been powered on in YEARS, which might render it unusable at this point. Contrary to popular opinion, NAND does not retain data forever w/o power, and if important info is lost, the controller might not work. Check out the PLP hardware tho!

Next up, thermal paste and heat sink. I'm just using the thermal paste that came with the cooler here, because the good stuff I bought is waiting for the 5950X that'll be coming later. I went for the "Messy X" pattern.

Allow me to introduce you to my Large Adult Son, the 'Be Quiet!' Dark Rock Pro 4. I went with aircooling b/c I doubt I will overclock, and the Dark Rock Pro had enough clearance for my RAM of choice, (only a couple of mm, but I only need 1!)

CHONKY.

FYI the thread isn’t done! Build resumes tomorrow with the power supply, video card, additional NVMe drive, and case fans. Then some testing and burn-in!

Ok we’re back! In goes the GPU, an MSI Radeon 5600XT. Much like the GPU, this is meant to be temporary and I plan on selling it once I can snag a 6800X or 3080. I don’t mind losing a few dollars if it means it get good use for a few months.

Here’s the data drive. Much like the 7100 MAX I am using for boot duties, this is a 2.4TB Micron 9100 that is old and retired from enterprise duties, but still packs a lot of I/O horsepower because it was meant for datacenter duty.

The power supply is a 750w Gigabyte unit. It was chosen largely because 1) It was on sale AND had a $20 rebate. ($89) 2) It was modular. 3) It was 80+ Gold certified. I do appreciate that it is also all black, including the cabling.

Unintentional blackout build continues.

Case fans arrived! Glad I can swap these in now instead of after. These are Arctic Cooling F12s. Only $30 for a 5-pack, and the consensus is that they’re nearly as good as fans that cost 3x as much. That made breaking with the all-black theme worth it for me.

One of the things I REALLY liked about these fans is that they’re PWM (Pulse Width Modulation. A fancy way of describing speed control) AND they can be daisy chained together. This means you can use a lot of them without needing a special fan hub. Neat.

Time to power this baby up! Don’t worry, this cabling is purely for bench testing purposes. I want to know everything is working right before I make the cabling pretty and perfect. Nothing worse than doing all that work just to have to rip it out b/c something is wrong!

Success! The first minute was fairly tense as the system went through a pretty lengthy first-boot power on self test (POST). I think the 128GB of RAM contributed to that very long wait. PHEW.

Now comes the beginning of the boring endgame. Routing and managing all these fiddlely cables around back.

Ok this is looking pretty good! The backside is a mess but I don’t care. There’s no extra perf or airflow back there. Now time to get an OS on there and do some burn-in testing.

Truly in the home stretch, now. Got to clean up my workspace, make room for the new tower on the other end of the desk, get it temporarily wired in, and let it burn-in and run some men stress over the next couple of days. “After” shot to follow.

Here’s all the tools I used. This iFixit kit is the best quality tool set I’ve ever bought. I’ve used every part of this kit, and it’s brilliant. Special mention to Be Quiet! for including a really nice magnetized screwdriver with their cooler, too!

Now to make sure all of that RAM works as expected. Going to let memtest86 crank against all 128GB overnight just to be sure...

Here it is in its (likely) final resting spot. The tiny little black box on the left is the PC it is replacing. Believe it or not, that thing is packing a 4-core i5-7500T and a GTX 1060! The tiny package means the fans really crank up whenever you do much of anything tho.

Somehow, right at the end, the system managed to get me. It didn’t quite draw blood, but it did cut my finger a bit, much like a paper cut. Proper build now.

Almost 2 full passes with no errors is pretty damn encouraging! Also am in love with how quiet it is. The little Zotac box has tons of coil whine and high pitched fan sounds, just because that’s what happens when you make something so powerful, so small.

Final part of the build is here: My TPM! Now I can have Windows Hello for workplace purposes with my Logitech Brio webcam.