A build for a good friend. This started out with no theme in mind, but just "whatever I could get my hands on" as it is in late 2021. The Newegg shuffle decided to be hilarious, and while I was fortunate enough to land a slot in one, they "awarded" me the opportunity to buy a Vision motherboard with an Aorus graphics card. Ugh.

But the Vision board got me thinking, and as my friend is a landscape architect who does some gaming on the side, I thought I'd see what I could do to land the matching video card. Alas, they were in stock nowhere. But I did find someone who was selling a Vision 3060 Ti (as he finally got his own opportunity to get a 3080), and I had an Aorus 3060 Ti to part with. Queue the ebay shuffle montage. The Vision card was lightly used, so light in fact that there was nary a spec of dust, and most of the plastic sheeting was still on the card. Huzzah.

With those in hand, the rest designed itself. I'm a big fan of the Fractal Meshify, and the 2 is quite nice to build in, and a nice improvement over my own "C". Fractal's AIO seems nice, and I experimented with the orientation in a few ways. The pump is mounted in the rad, and not on the block, so there's some flexibility there. Ultimately I settled on the arrangement you see there to minimize hose bend, and to give me a place to tie the horribly placed GPU cables to.

While I've long enjoyed Gigabyte boards, their RGB Fusion software is garbage in my opinion, and anything other than static lighting looks like a slideshow. I was annoyed at having to install iCUE *just* to get the memory to light up. 200MB of installed software just for lighting. Ugh.

But it runs nice, and overall I'm quite pleased with the look. The Vision board and GPU look stellar in my opinion, and I much prefer the clean lines and aesthetic to the "gamer" oriented boards. Gigabyte has a nice color scheme going here, and I think it really makes a white chassis worth it.

Let me know what you all think and if you'd do anything differently. Thanks!