It's time to build a machine again, but this time I'm not building it for someone else, but for myself. For me, this is always a new adventure, a new challenge, because although I am building the machine for myself, I see it as an element of my portfolio that defines my PC builder philosophy. This makes me pay even more attention to the small details, including cable management. It's a kind of benchmark and baseline so that if someone decides in the future to hire me to build their machine, I can show off these finished machines with a clear heart.

Impressions

I've been using my new configuration for almost 1 month now and I have to say that the difference in performance compared to the previous machine is dramatic. Previous games I've played on the 9th gen platform were fine but still sometimes had problems getting the new AAA games to run properly. Unfortunately, it meant a lot that my motherboard only supported PCI 3rd generation at most and this really put a stamp on the performance of the video card, which had to perform at half power for years. Now I have almost no performance issues. If I had to guess, I can get double the performance in games as before.

Problems

Unfortunately, despite the good things, there are negatives. I may have picked a very bad lottery ticket somewhere, but minor major instabilities still occur occasionally, and the AIO tends to behave strangely. At certain RPMs the AIO is louder than when a neighbour is hitting the drill in the panel, and this sometimes comes through the headphones, which is disturbing. I'll probably get this under warranty. The other problem I have, and if I can solve it in the long run, there will be an article about it, but it's the instability of the memory XMP profile. I probably need another BIOS from ASUS to fix these stability problems, but for now I can't use the 7600MTs speed but only spin the modules at 4800MTs, but it is stable, which is more important for me at the moment. That's all the negative I can say for now.

Conclusion

I don't regret at all that I started this project and invested in this machine. Now again for 5 years/5 generations I don't feel I need to upgrade my machine much. Maybe I will upgrade my GPU to a 5080 GPU when it is released but until then the performance is perfectly fine especially since I am planning to add a streamer machine, so the performance of the main machine will not be split at all for streaming.