Upgraded from an i7-920, with a GTX 750ti to this thing, so a pretty substantial move up.

First build in 9 years, and I absolutely fell in love with the process of picking the parts I wanted, to try and maximize a nice balance between performance, aesthetics, price, and acoustics. Every non-bequiet! component purchased was on sale (Black Friday / Cyber Monday / Boxing Day), so while it wasn't cheap, I feel as though I got this thing put together for a pretty reasonable price.

I was watching and reading a bunch of case reviews, and out of the cases that all got great reviews, at a reasonable price, my wife loved the h500, and sold me on it. I went back and forth between it and the p350x, but the h500 just grew on me more and more each time I looked at it. I am planning to build a baby rig for my 12 year old in an h200 or h400 next. The CAM software required for the included SmartDevice isn't amazing, but it's been fine for my air cooled build.

After literally losing sleep trying to figure out what cooling solution I wanted to use (just saw too many poor AIO reviews to go that option right now), I finally decided on the Dark Rock 4 from bequiet! Had I not already purchased the Corsair RGB RAM, I probably would have opted for the PRO version, but since I paid for RGB bling, I kinda wanted to be able to see it, thus went for the smaller cooler.

I nearly pulled the trigger on a Black Friday deal for a GTX 1070ti, but didn't because I assumed there would be better sales on Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day. By Cyber Monday the same card was nearly $200 more expensive - so I missed that boat. Lucky for me, the 2070 XC Gaming Ultra was $130 off on Boxing day, and only ended up costing about $50 more than the 1070ti deal I missed out on in November. I'm hoping to use an EVGA 2 slot bracket, along with a CableMod vertical PCI-e bracket to mount it vertically to show off a bit, and fill up the bottom half of my case. If that process goes well, I'll likely pick up an RGB lightstrip to attach to the back plate and give it some back lighting.