It's has been right around 10 years since the last time I purchased/built a PC. I had an old Dell XPS 8500 that's been running like a champ forever, but sadly, it's beyond outdated & has been used to run some Smart Home essentials.

This whole process started when I ran down to our local Micro Center to pick up some additional RAM for my Wife's Gaming PC. Like everyone else on planet Earth these past few months, chasing down "Now In-Stock" alerts on every Discord server imaginable, with no luck whatsoever...

I must've shown up at literally the exact right moment that freezing cold Saturday afternoon, because upon me asking about inventory of the RTX GPU's and/or Ryzen 5000 Series CPU's, I got a different response than what we've all become accustomed to hearing. The guy who I had approached & asked responded with:

"You know, I honestly don't know man, let me go see what's up in the back, it's been awhile since I've been back there ... I'll be right back, don't go anywhere ..."

He disappeared for ~15 minutes, then emerges from the back storage room with a shopping cart, headed directly towards me. This confused the shit out of me to be honest, it was so jam-packed in the store, he could've been headed towards literally 50+ different customers standing around.

"Must be your lucky day dude, I've just nabbed you the very last AMD Ryzen 9 5900X, as well as the very last EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra Gaming that we've got back there ... not bad right???"

I immediately had that internal "I'm freakin' out man" moment, then my hands started slowly trembling realizing just how absolutely absurd/insane this scenario just became. Talk about dumb f*ing luck ... At that point, I got to witness 3 grown men go into full panic-attack/temper tantrum mode "out in the wild", right there in the middle of the store ... ( which made me really uncomfortable ... )

Long story short, I grabbed a bunch more stuff, headed towards the checkout & paid for my goodies. As I'm walking towards the door, I start getting some real shifty eyed looks from everyone else standing around the checkout. The manager on duty popped up behind me & suggested sending me to my car with a "Micro Center Security Escort" saying "better safe than sorry ... you just never know nowadays ..."

Update ( 09/20/2021 ):
I kept having ongoing issues with my previous GIGABYTE Aorus Ultra motherboard ( random reboots, constantly disconnecting drives, etc. ), so it's getting replaced by the motherboard I had originally wanted to get. Since everything had to come out, I figured I'd take this opportunity to do a case swap, along with some additional cooling & aesthetic upgrades 👌🏻

Here's what's changed:

• Swapped out the GIGABYTE Aorus Ultra X570 motherboard with an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero X570 motherboard
  
• Upgraded my previous Lian Li O11 Dynamic to its big brother, the Lian Li O11 Dynamic XL ROG
  Added 4 additional 120mm fans [i]( 3 above AIO for push/pull + 1 on the rear of case )[/i]
  
• Hooking up the new/upgraded fan/RGB controllers [i]( an additional Commander Pro, as well as custom adapters that are able to integrate Lian Li's Strimer Plus cables & case RGB into the iCUE ecosystem )[/i]
  
• Better/improved cable management