Project: Razer (AKA Trigger's Broom. If you understand that reference, you know what the gist of my current build is about!) has been my personal build project since 2013. Ive been on apprentice wage the whole time, so part buying was an exciting (and rare) occurrence. However, over the 6 years I've been working on her, I've seen her break almost every component (some of them twice. or thrice), transition GPU's, transition from CPU's such as the AMD 9590FX and 8350, to the 4th Gen i5 and now the 7th Gen i7 and make the change from a boring, air cooled mid-tower to an overly excessive RGB water cooled full tower.

It started life in a white Aerocool mid-tower case with the following parts (can't remember the exact brands/specs, sorry!):
• an air cooled AMD processor
• 8GB Crucial RAM
• GTX 950 GPU
• 1TB HDD
• 500W Aerocool PSU

The following year brought upon several motherboard changes. My original motherboard failed, so I transitioned to an MSI 990FX and with that, I ramped up the 8350 processor to the 9590FX (8 cores @ 4.7GHz). Now, I thought I COULD air cool it, however, it soon told me (in the form of thermal throttling, blue screens and numerous crashes), that this was not possible. Now, instead of improving the cooling (the smart thing to do), I decided to borrow a spare, compatible AMD processor from a friend so I could reconfigure my BIOS settings so I didn't blow up a new CPU. However, once again, I was let down. This time, by the motherboard. Which blew in spectacular fashion after i changed the energy efficiency from "eco" setting, to "High Performance". Frustrated, I ditched AMD altogether, bought a Z97 Pro WiFi AC Motherboard from ASUS, an i5 4960K, upgraded to 16GB of RAM and bought one of two GPU's I would buy that year, after my first GIGABYTE GPU purchase was DOA (I think it was the GTX970).
2015 came around and I further upped the RAM to 32GB and installed a Crucial 500GB SSD to use as a boot drive, with my original 1TB HDD as main storage. My 2016/17 was spent basically replacing things as they broke (killed ANOTHER motherboard, 1 RAM stick, one HDD which I upgraded to a 2TB, my 500W PSU, the replacement 750W PSU and a few fans).
Now, 2018. This was a big year for the build. I made plans for it and set goals to achieve. I had a vision for it and was excited! I planned to increase the size, improve the cooling, up the speed and the looks. After all, why would you want to look at a PC with awful cable management, stock coolers and a few other niggles. I didn't have many nice things, and with that, set out to actually build my....nice thing.
To kick the year off, I upgraded to the 980ti and began saving and listing other parts to use. Nearer the end of the year, I spent about 2 months wages (no joke) on a heap of parts. Completely overhauling everything, leaving only my storage drives. These upgrades were:
• Upgrading the case to a full tower with tempered glass sides.
• FINALLY making the change from air cooled to (closed loop) water cooling
• Adding RGB fans (with remote control)
• Upgrading the motherboard to something capable performing SLI suitably
• Added a second 980ti to SLI with
• Swapping the 32GB of RAM to 16GB of RGB RAM
• Swapping to the Intel i7 CPU AND overclocking it
• Upping the PSU to 1000W
• swapping my 2TB HDD for a 4TB HDD
• Upgrading one of my monitors to 4K resolution

Finally, 2019. This year has been all about enjoying the rig I've spent so much money and time building. I recently installed a 240GB M.2. drive for games which take a long time to load and tidied up some cables. So, whats next?

I'm planning on swapping my closed loop water cooler out and replacing it with hard line, custom loop cooling. Im also going to change my SLI'd 980ti's out for something maybe in the Nvidia 10 series or even 20 series, be it single or SLI.

Be it a small achievement, I changed the colour theme from MAXIMUM RGB to green & black, which included custom green covers for my Oculus Rift headset and using Razer Peripherals. I put an image on twitter and none other than the CEO of Razer liked the tweet. Simple things please simple minds I guess!

Anyway, hope you've enjoyed hearing the story of my build, I know its not the most expensive, beautiful or powerful PC; but it's taught me so much, I've made some great friends in the PC building community and it's even opened my eyes to new ambition regarding PC building. Bring on the future of the build!