This is my sixth and, as of writing this (2021-03-06), current personal computer. Bought in parts, assembled and somehow got it to run on the first try despite still feeling like I never have any idea of what I'm doing when it comes to the front panel connections (can those get updated soon? Like, any decade now?) and the case having some arcane fan hub thing with hieroglyphs for an instruction manual.

If my previous PC was the most expensive one I'd ever bought at the time... Let's just not talk about this one. 'Tis too painful.

Absolutely worth it though. Feels so good to have a powerful computer again, and basically everything looks and runs great. The old machine served me incredibly well for many years but truly began showing its age around the release of DOOM Eternal, which I did power through but struggled mightily with in its high tempo fights because of the muddy visuals and sluggish controls due to forced low settings & framerate.

Ordered my new PC in late November 2020, and coincidentally around that time the old one began experiencing random reboots (likely PSU related) which increased in frequency as time went on. I estimate that it has crashed easily 200, maybe 300 times since then, so these past couple of months waiting for AMD and Nvidia's supply shortages have been a bad time.

No more, though. I'm up and running again since this Monday and my depression, tonsillitis and covid-19 are all cured.

Much like my previous build, there was no real focus on flashy aesthetics for or inside the case, just a big, clean, tidy build to provide high framerates and low temperatures. Unlike last time, there is a glass sidepanel now through which I can see the softly pulsing default RGB details on the motherboard and GPU and that's fine. Neat to occasionally glance over and make sure that the fans are working and nothing is too dusty, I suppose. (I want to put a little pillar of something in there to support the GPU, man these things are heavy. [edit: Done, feels much better.])

Speaking of temperatures and fans though, I get the impression that there is a big trend of keeping fans as slow or even still as possible now. By default, neither the PSU nor GPU bother spinning up until something serious is happening, and even the CPU fan curve is holding back as much as possible. Not super into this approach personally, would probably prefer significantly lower temps (especially at idle) so at some point I'll definitely adjust all these fan curves [edit: Went ahead and did that, way better]. The case dampens most of the sound anyway and my general room ambiance isn't so great that there is any point in trying to keep the PC dead silent.

[edit: Case temperature was a big problem with stock fan configuration (2 in front, 1 out back). Added one out top above the CPU cooler for dramatic improvement.]