Having built a PC just two years ago in 2019 I decided that I would once more face down the evils of the component shortages and do it again. This happened because of an amusing confluence of events which put me in a position to have not one, but TWO fancy nVidia RTX cards in my hands! One was obviously going to go into my 2019 PC (already a perfectly cromulent set of parts) but now that I found myself with two I decided to just get stupid and build an absurd computer that ought to last me well into the back end of the decade with minimal necessary upgrades.

In addition to wanting lots of high end parts, I’ve also really fallen in love with portions of the PC gamer aesthetic. Specifically custom water cooling loops and enough RGB to host a rave inside your own case. I’m still not a big fan of the l33t h4x pRo GaMiNg vibes of weirdly jagged devices and pointy bullshit and fatal1ty KILLER DEATH MASTER branding, but blinky lights absolutely rule and syncing them to game audio/music/what-have-you is just absurdly satisfying to me. Throw in some tubing with crazy colored liquid that also keeps my machine cool and quiet and here we are.

Anyway, probably in part to reduce the kind of massive amount of stress/anxiety/sadness I’ve been feeling since June, and because I suddenly found myself flush with some extra money I really wasn’t expecting, I figured I’d treat myself and just get stupid about this build. I’ve also fallen down a massive rabbit hole of YouTube videos, subreddits (boycotting the PCMR dipshits but r/buildapc and r/watercooling are both lovely), and getting great help / advice from coworkers and folks on Twitter. I’ll hopefully have more posts and pics as I go through the build process, which I anticipate will take me roughly a week of evening times / weekend work. I can slap together a normal PC in a day but I really want to nail this one, and I’m very nervous about the custom water cooling loop given that water × electricity = oof, so I really want to make sure I get it right and don’t, for example, nuke that $1800 video card I just got!

specs tl;dr

  • Ryzen 5950x (16x cores / 32x threads)
  • nVidia RTX 3080 Ti (it fast)
  • 64 GB DDR4 4000mhz DRAM
  • 2TB NVMe PCIe4 SSD (OS + games)
  • 1TB NVMe PCIe4 SSD (For Linux distros via WSL and k8s VMs)

wtf am I doing with this

justifying this extravagant nonsense are my plans to:

  • Continue gaming + streaming. I expect ‘22 / ‘23 to bring out some pretty intense new games that I want to run @ 3440x1440 with high vfx+framerates. I also keep threatening to stream and this thing will let me actually do it, particularly for a game like FFXIV which isn’t, itself, so demanding that I can’t also easily stream from the same device at excellent framerates.
  • Invest in hobby-work. I wanted a big + fast secondary disk and a boatload of RAM so I can run a small fleet of VMs for Kubernetes clusters. You know, for fun, like normal people do. I do like the idea of being able to rapidly build big OSS projects etc. I’m not a prolific contributor but I do a lot of at-home tinkering anyway. Maybe I’ll get really into Redox!
  • Show off. That’s really why I’m doing this water cooling thing. There is some modest rationale for custom loops in terms of thermals / noise but the reality is they just look cool af and I want a beautiful aesthetic baby to mount on the wall and stare at when I inevitably get bored of having this amazing device and just sit there instead of doing anything.