This was my first attempt at a sleeper, and my second PC build. The journey started when I got an old Acer computer case with some old hardware in it, and it didn't take me long to decide that I wanted to build a sleeper in it. The case is an AcerPower FH, apparently from a pre-built back in the day. The motherboard in it was an old Intel board with an LGA 775 socket. There was 8GB of DDR2 with a Pentium E6500. The machine also had a Thermaltake 600W PSU and an NVIDIA 8400GS that I plan to clean up and put in a shadow box on the wall in my room. The power supply worked when I hooked it up to the system, or at least for a day until I tried to turn it on the next day and it wouldn't work. It was a sketchy, old power supply with no certification whatsoever, so I put it in a pile where all the dead components were going to go. Luckily, I had another power supply.

The person who gave me the case also gave me some old hard drives, one of which was an 80GB model from WD. I wanted to make sure they worked, so I plugged the new PSU, an EVGA 750P2, into the system and connected all the cables. I pressed the power button and immediately the hard drive started smoking so I frantically unplugged the power cable. It took me a while to figure it out, but the reason for this was I had plugged in both the SATA power and the molex connector, as I didn't read the tiny warning written on the hard drive. I took off the PCB and the controller was completely burnt to a crisp and smelled like burnt plastic. I put it in a plastic bag, closed it, put it in the dead hardware pile and forgot about it. That's all I'm going to say about the old hardware, as I don't feel like writing any more about it.

Moving on to the new hardware. I was originally going to go with an RTX 3060, but I decided not to because I found a great deal on the 3070, so I picked it up for around $270. I bought the CPU at $178. I was closely monitoring the prices of each component waiting to see if the price would drop. That's another reason I went for the 3070, because when I first planned out this build, the 12600K was around $320; so I wouldn't have had as much to spend on the GPU. The ram stayed at the same price the entire time I was planning this build, so I bought the Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB kit with two 16GB sticks running at 3600MT/s. I already had an RM1000X, so I used that. Luckily it fit in the case! It's also being used as an exhaust because it's in the top of the case, which helps for natural convection.

The CPU cooler I bought was the Be Quiet! Pure Rock Slim 2 cooler. It keeps the processor at around 32-38 degrees Celsius (89-100 F.) The fan is super quiet even at full bore which is about 2200 RPM. It's worked just fine since I got it and the CPU temps under a stress test in Cinebench R23 ended up at around 65-70 C (149-158 F), a result I'm super happy with. By the way, I managed to get around 17,100 without overclocking, which I'm still not sure if I want to do.

Now, about the GPU, the results in-game, at least in terms of FPS, I'm super happy with. Temps on the other hand, not so much. Although I'm not too sure what I was expecting for temperatures to begin with, after about half an hour to 45 minutes in GTA the GPU temps rose to around 87-88 degrees Celsius (188-190 F), the point at which the card started to throttle the clock speeds. When I opened the side panel, the temps went back down to 70 C (158 F) in about 2 minutes. But it's not really practical when you have to get up and open the side panel under a load after half an hour. I'm working on getting another 92mm fan for the front of the case, because the one in the front right now is from one of those AC vents with fans in them that you put in your ac vent. The fan has PWM, but it's not working. It's also like 50mm thick and the cable isn't long so I used some Raspberry Pi GPIO extension cables as a makeshift fan cable extension. It also sounds like a jet engine.

If there's anything more you'd like to know about the build, please leave a comment and I'll try to answer it. I'm also going to provide a link to the PCPartPicker list I made.
PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/xswZfy

CPU: Intel Core i5-12600K 3.7 GHz 10-Core Processor ($179.99)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Pure Rock Slim 2 CPU Cooler ($26.90 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock Z690M Phantom Gaming 4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($69.98 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 840 Evo 250 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($141.99 @ Amazon), I paid $0, I had mine laying around as an extra drive so I put it in there for a little extra storage
Storage: Samsung MZVPV512HDGL-00000 512 GB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($35.00), I paid $0 because I also had it laying around
Video Card: MSI VENTUS 2X OC GeForce RTX 3070 LHR 8 GB Video Card ($550.00 @ Amazon), I got mine on eBay for $270
Power Supply: Corsair RM1000x 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($247.60 @ Amazon), I paid $0 because I had it on the shelf already.
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro OEM - DVD 64-bit ($149.98 @ Newegg), I installed the ISO off of Microsoft's website and used a Windows 7 Pro product key to activate it so I got it for $0
Wireless Network Adapter: Intel AX200 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax M.2 Wi-Fi Adapter ($10.96 @ Amazon), I got for $0 because I had one laying around
Keyboard: Razer BlackWidow Chroma V2 RGB Wired Gaming Keyboard, I got mine at a goodwill for $25 with no keycaps, so I found some PBT ones on amazon for $20
Mouse: Logitech MX MASTER 3S Wireless Optical Mouse ($99.99 @ B&H), I paid $0 because I already had one
Total: $1642.38 (Total amount I paid was $720.86)
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-09-13 12:08 EDT-0400