This is a general purpose machine that represents my first foray into building a machine from scratch. It will be used for light gaming on occasions, but mostly for work. Building my own PC has been a dream of mine since childhood, and I never had the time or the means to make it a reality. Up to this point, I've disassembled, upgraded, and reassembled a number of older machines, but nothing of this caliber.

I started putting the ideas for this build together in early summer of 2017. I initially leaned toward an Intel system (possibly an i5 7600K)...I knew basically nothing about PC hardware, and in my mind, Intel represented quality. I started watching YouTube videos and quickly found out about Ryzen. I knew that an i5 or i7 would provide higher clock speeds for gaming, but eventually settled on Ryzen for better multithreaded performance in productivity workloads.

I started getting parts slowly in fall of 2017. I started with platform-neutral parts like the case, power supply, and SSD. I knew Coffee Lake, Ryzen 2, and potentially next gen GPU's would be out soon. When GPU prices went through the roof, my plans for a GTX 1060 went out the window. In spring of 2018, I bought a Ryzen 2200G as a short-term solution, built the system around that chip, and modestly overclocked it to 3.7 GHz on the stock cooler. Shortly after, ASUS released the Cerberus 1050 and 1050 Ti. I knew I'd only really be playing older titles (nostalgia), and those only occasionally, so I bit the bullet on the Ti model. I got it at a (relatively) reasonable price compared to the rest of the market because I nabbed it before it sold out and the price got too out of hand. When prices normalized, I eventually traded up to an RX 570.

After Ryzen 2 came out, I planned to pick up a Ryzen 2600 or 2600X, but my local Best Buy started carrying processors, and they had the 1600 (which was my original pick for this build) on sale for $159. WIth the 2600 selling for at least 30 to 40 dollars more, I didn't think the extra performance jump justified the price, especially because I was already planning to overclock.

I have this chip OC'ed to 3.9 GHz with 1.325V with an LLC setting of 4 (1 being extreme overcompensation for vDroop and 8 being max vDroop). Tested stability at 4 GHz and 1.3875 V on Prime95 Blend, and was stable for over an hour. However, eventually one core threw an error, so I backed it off to 3.9. I'd love to get to that magical 4.0 GHz, but I don't want to push voltage and temps too far.

I'm pretty happy with the way everything came out. If I had it to do again, I would have bought the CPU and GPU earlier, rather than waiting, but I had no way of knowing huge GPU price increases were coming. Did a lot of research, and though I might have tweaked a few things, I'm pretty proud of the result.