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.
Congrats!
At this point I’d just say enjoy the new build.
Easy first steps. Enable the XMP profile in the bios to get the most out of your ram since ryzen is very sensitive to that.
Otherwise, I’d leave it as-is. Maybe grab 3DMark on sale ($5 or so) from steam and bench your system just to make sure you’re within expected results compared to others.
PBO for the cpu pretty much gets you 90% there on your max cpu overclock plus a little more voltage than you’d have with a manual one. The X3D cpus are really thick with the stacked cache so they do require decent cooling compared to non X3D skus. So it may just run a little warm but nothing crazy.
The big thing these days for gpu’s is undervolting. I’ve been able to cut out 50w or so from my 3080 with no discernible performance hit when coupled with my 5600x. Check out the Optimum YouTube channel (formerly Optimum Tech) on his undervolting results. His videos are a little older but are applicable to most gpus that are power hungry.