I built my daughter a quasi-gaming computer about 4 or so years ago using an AMD A10, 12GB DDR3 RAM, 128GB SSD, XFX R9 380 2GB. It worked great during the time it was built. Fast forward to today, she's a college freshman and her gaming has evolved to AAA games. One night, she came downstairs wearing a grimace and frustratingly explained how she was no longer able to play games smoothly, even at low settings. So began our journey. I had been in the desktop business minded computers too long and needed to brush up on gaming gear...Wow, have things changed. I naively thought that if I just stuck a better graphics card in her current rig, it would be good to go, so I scored a super cheap GTX 1060 6GB that was used in an Etherium mining rig (cryptocurrency crash was good for gamers). Well, it worked, the games automatically set themselves at High or Ultra and all played without stuttering. But I was curious and ran benchmarks and was disappointed that they were much lower than they should have been and ultimately found out the CPU was a bottleneck. So I researched what was out there and saw AMD was coming out with Ryzen 3, but not until mid 2019 or so.

The purpose of her build was not only to play AAA games, but as a college student who takes some of her classes online, streams videos to watch, or streams her games during play, has ten-million tabs open at once; she needed something that can multi task. We had to get her off her current rig, because it somehow knew we were going to replace it so it started random shut downs, but we also wanted to build something for the upcoming Third-Gen Ryzen. I involved my daughter in the build and we both learned a lot, especially her so now she can easily spot elite builds, knows specs on various components or call out people who lie about theirs. So we were able to cut costs in certain areas so we can put that towards other components keeping in mind this build was for the next-gen Ryzens. I didn't realize how expensive RGB could be until this build and DDR4 RAM prices nearly knocked me over, but it was for my daughter who's a straight "A" student and likes gaming and for a single dad like me, didn't make it hard for me to raise her so she deserved it. The future upgrade, Ryzen 7 3700 and a 360mm AIO (at least that's the goal).

Components used that's missing from the list below are;
Cool Laboratory Liquid Ultra liquid metal thermal compound
Micron 5100 480GB 2.5" SSD
Seagate BarraCuda 8TB 3.5" HDD
Rosewill Neon M55 Gaming Mouse
Rosewill Neon K81 Gaming Keyboard