After getting into PC building last year, my dad saw what I was doing with my own build (shameless plug: https://builds.gg/builds/black-carbon-6370) so he asked me to help him upgrade his existing PC because it was getting outdated.

It was originally a Dell Alienware ITX build but has since been rebuilt in a larger case, by Sharkoon. His specs were: i7 4770, 8 gb RAM, h81 motherboard, GTX 1080. In there he had a 256 GB SSD and a 2 TB Seagate Barracuda @7200 RPM. It was a solid foundation and I took out the parts that I could reuse, the gpu and hdd and went from there. My dad wanted a PC that would last him a long time and that would perform great. He was hesitant at the idea of overclocking but more on that later. For my dad's needs we decided we would go the intel route again. So I picked the 8700k because it's still a great performer and at the time I couldn't find a 9th gen i7 or i9 in stock. Figured I'd save some money on that and get the 8th gen beast. Dark Rock 4 was an obvious choice, it's quiet, all black and remarkably easy to mount. Picked a Z390 motherboard that had the features I was looking for to go with the new CPU, namely Asus bios because I love that and solid overclocking support (which of course I didn't tell my dad yet). 32 GB of ram was more of a futureproofing thing and because my dad works with CAD from home as well. Went with fast ram as it was a 10 euro difference at the time between that and a 2666 kit. Storage wise I picked up a 1 TB ssd so he won't have to worry about storage for the foreseeable future. And movies and other non essential stuff remained on the 2 TB hdd. Video card got transplanted from his old build after a through cleaning and repaste with TG Kryonaut. And last but definately not least the case: Fractal's Define C. I used to have that same case, with the window for my first build about a year ago. I was very happy with how clean a build that became and the very convenient dust filters were such a pleasure to maintain. With that I mean the front and bottom ones which are serviceable without even moving the system. Bottom one pulls out from the front and after pulling off the front panel (also from the bottom grip) you can take out and clean the front filter as well. To match the existing fans I added 2 Dynamic GP14's to use as intake and took out the 120mm fan in the front.

And then the building process began! I built and tested the PC at my place after picking up all the parts and I kept my dad in the dark on purpose on how it was going. After building it I decided try and overclock the CPU to something reasonable that would boost performance but won't introduce unnecessary heat or noise to the PC. I settled for 4.8 ghz at 1.19V. This lead to idle temps between 26-28 degrees and during full load it was staying quite cool at 60-65 degrees. With that the Dark Rock 4 was completely silent. I had no problem setting ram at 3200 mhz and didn't overclock the GPU except for moving the power target and voltage sliders up to max. I also made a custom fan curve for that so it keeps the fans running in idle as well. That still ended up being completely silent but kept the card at ~35 degrees at idle. So mission accomplished: a powerful and silent build! 3 days after accepting the task I showed up at my dad's and surprised him with the build PC. We hooked up the PC and he turned it on. The first thing he said was: is it on? I don't think so. It was on but he was used to the stock cooler on the 4770, which is a jet engine btw... We set up the PC and he's been a happy user for the past 4 or so weeks now. Since then he's been bragging to co-workers and friends about his amazing new PC and how his own son built it. I've been approached to build 2 more systems so I guess I've got some work to do now!

Thank you if you made it this far, thought I'd share the full story behind the PC as that's what makes this one different from all the other ones out there. Have a nice day!