My first ever PC build, A budget PC build with some upgrades along the way.

Started off as a budget PC build, I needed a PC/Laptop to do work University and also play videogames and do some editing and photoshop. With only a budget of $1000 CAD more or less, I started with meticulously researching parts and compatibility but also keeping in mind Price to Performance. Several hours was wasted into looking into Reddit for build, that's when I found r/buildapc and r/buildapcsales(and its canadian counterpart r/Buildapcsalescanada), I also found help on r/PCMasterRace and the discord of buildapc and pcmasterrace. Along with Reddit, Youtube channels such as LinusTechTips, PaulsHardware, and BitWit helped with providing information and specs on parts I planned to buy and several of their tutorials on how to build a PC helped. However, It became a full AMD build when I figured out that Intel offering a lot less cores and threads for the price, AMD offered their Ryzen 5 2600 as a 6 core, 12 threads CPU as the king of mid range builds, offering the same amount of cores and threads as the 8700 Intel CPU's and could be overclocked from the factory. Along with the capability to be overclocked straight from the factory, it didn't need a more expensive motherboard to OC, Thus offering quite a lot for being under budget. At $220 CAD when I bought it in late September 2018, it's a great CPU for how much it cost me. Motherboard wise, ASRock offered the cheapest B450 Chipset mobo and being Matx made with cheaper than ATX mobo's, It has a pretty bad UEFI/BIOS, but it works, for the price of $100 CAD back in September 2018. RAM wise, TeamGroup Vulcan Red 8x2 16Gb was the cheapest. (I paid nearly $190 for both shipping and cost. that RAM price fixing.. I cry) 3000MHz as I was advised that Ryzen CPU's worked best with high speed RAM, although its CAS Latency is still 16 and not 15, but price to what getting a CL15 instead of CL16 is barely noticeable.

Storage wise, it was recommended to me to get a SSD for booting windows and putting some of my games there for faster load times and most of the storage would be handled by my HDD, that I chose a 240GB SSD from TeamGroup, it was cheap at $50 CAD and it was better than Kingston's A400, ADATA SU650 and other bad SSD's (as I was told). Western Digital's Blue Series that was 1TB handled most of storage on games, and etc., at also $50 CAD it was a good starting storage for budget PC builds.

GPU wise, my budget was eaten by my GPU due to the still remnants of the mining craze that lingered in late September 2018. I initially had chosen to buy a 1060 6GB, However; I was told that even the cheapest models of the 1060's were way too expensive and was suggested on getting a Radeon RX 580 from AMD, instead of getting the 4GB version, I chose to buy the 8GB version, which provided more VRAM at just $10 more than the 4GB version. As to which 580, the cheapest I found was MSI's RX 580 8GB Armor which was $330 CAD, although there is some regret on buying the card as the thermals on it is not very good, heating up to 80C. However; I still went and overclocked it to squeeze a little bit more performance that I could.

It was a no brainer on the PSU as Corsair's CXM line reliable and 650 was more than enough to power my system and any further GPU/CPU upgrades that I might do.

The CPU cooler was not a direct buy, that came with my semi upgrade at the start of 2019, and the need overclock my CPU was becoming unbearable. The Gammaxx 400 from DeepCool provided enough headroom to overclock the 65 TDP R5 2600 to over 4GHz.

As for the case, that also came with the New Year upgrade. The Meshify C from Fractal Design looked amazing with its front mesh panel and tempered glass side panel to showcase the internals of my tower. However; the budget build originally was housed inside a DeepCool Tesseract SW, a cheap $40 case that looked like it was from 2010's with its side panel fan mounts, thousands of drive bays for 2.5", 3.5" and 5.25". That and coupled with crappy single front 120mm fan mount and no filters for any fans that would be mounted to the side pane, top, and front and only for the PSU, which looked very cheap. But for what it costed and my budget at the time, it was a great buy at $40. However; the upgrade in New Years and my quest for **MAXIMUM AIRFLOW** I bought the Meshify C. It provides quite a lot of fan mounts with 3 120mm in the front, 2 140mm at the top and a 120mm at the bottom if you wanted to take out the 3.5" drive bay cage. Case Fans were chosen to be PWM and to be the cheapest, noise was not an issue as I would be using headphones all the time, So Arctic's F12 and F14 PWM fans were chosen as they were the cheapest and provided PWM and it was black and white, matching my semi colour scheme. Silverstone's PWM Fan Hub provided more fan connectors to control all the fans in the case and control it according to the temperature of the CPU and GPU.

Pheripherals wise, the "budget" build started with 2 Dell 60Hz 1080p IPS monitors that was salvaged from dad's job which were throwing away old tech, I initially used a Logitech K120 membrane keyboard till I was gifted a mechanical keyboard in Christmas. However; the mice I'm still using is the Razer Abyssus 2014, an old gift, it has served me well for the past couple of years playing on parents laptop, DPI set at 3500 and polling rate set at 1000Hz, it's a fantastic mouse in my opinion with its ambidextrous design, light weight and light pressure on the switches. The K551 Vara from Redragon is a mechanical keyboard that I got for Christmass, its aluminum backplate and outemu blue switches with RGB is just perfect for me as I like the clickity clackity sounds that the blue switches make and the RGB helps during night time playing, although I suspect one of my roommates see my keyboard as being extremely loud and obnoxious. HyperX's Cloud II's were the perfect headphones for me as it on sale and provided everything I need for gaming, 7.1 surround sound, a microphone, and over ear/circumaural. The dual monitor setup with the Dell P2214H was pretty good, it was IPS and 1080p altough it was just at 60Hz, so when New Year came around, I jumped on getting a 144Hz 1080p monitor the moment I saw one on sale. Enter MSI's G24c, a 144Hz VA panel 1080p, a decent curved monitor that has a higher refresh rate, making it better for FPS games, and taking full advantage of the frames that my RX 580 8GB can push out.

Overclocking my PC wasn't so much hard but just researching on what to do and what not to do, in terms with the CPU, I didn't initially plan on overclocking it as it could boost up to 3.9GHz when under load in editing and gaming, however; it became apparent that I could push my CPU a little bit more and improve my PC's performance. And so I overclocked my CPU to 3.7GHz, 1.3v, but the stock Wraith cooler could not handle that much heat and I had to buy cooler that could handle the heat it was putting out, so a Gammaxx 400 was the choice, cheap and could handle the overclock and decently cooling my CPU whilst under load. And so my CPU now runs at 4.05GHz at 1.35v, I wish I could've gone higher but anything over 1.35v seems deterrent on keeping the CPU reliable and lasting longer, I didn't win the silicon lottery. GPU wise, it came with a 1366MHz core and 2000MHz memory, I easily OC'ed to 1430MHz core and 2150MHz memory and pushing just that much improve FPS at the cost of fan noise and heat. I'm starting to look for solutions on how to cool my RX 580 by trying to find an aftermarket GPU, AIO or air, or mayble just completely upgrading to a Vega or AMD's 2019 GPU (*IF THEY EVER HAPPEN**cries*).

Building wasn't so much a hassle but more so time consuming, it took me an entire afternoon and evening to fully assemble and also worry if any of my parts arrive DOA to my apartment or that none of my parts were compatible. The emotions were of a rollercoaster, I was excited at the start, but as quickly as I got excited, I quickly became engrossed in fear. Fearing of messing up my build, such as the static electricity that I thought would kill my PC(In retrospect I forgot that I had researched the very thing and that it is not 2004 anymore and that computer components of today are very much static electricity resistant. smh) or that I might short circuit any components or plug the wrong thing to the wrong input. As I said that the emotions of that of a rollercoaster, as soon I finish on putting something or assembling something, for example the putting of the CPU to the motherboard. During the assembly it was nerve wracking, I was careful not to drop the CPU or over tighten the screws for the cooler, as soon as I was done, I felt proud and relaxed since I have finished a part of the build, but as soon as that ended, I quickly became engrossed in fear soon after due to worrying if I did it correctly and that I didn't mess up anything and also because I still had to assemble other parts of the PC. All in all I started the build at 14:00 and ended the assembly part at 18:00 (Yes, I am using 24H you damn Americans, its easier to wonder what the time that way. The first fire up was more so anxious due to me not having a DVI-D or anything to connect my GPU to my Dell P22414H, I had to drive to Walmart and pick up a DVI-D cable that costed me $30 CAD (SMH). However; once I hit the PSU's switch to on, and pressed the power button on my case, there was no post.. No input was getting to my monitor, the fans fired up but then quickly died and it did this for several times. My fears of it not working were looming, along with being scared was regret of buying as it did not work the first time I fired it up, I became very depressed. But I quickly tried to figure out why my first PC build did not work, first things to get checked were the RAM. Apparently I was too dumb to notice that my RAM sticks were not fully pushed the down, there was no click, as soon as I started to press down on my RAM, a click was heard, the second time, there was another click. I wondered if it was the reason my PC did not start due to not having any recognizable or useable RAM and I proceeded to put the PSU on and press the power button, as soon as that happened, my PC quickly posted, I was overwhelmed by joy that I yelled out a verbal WOOO and my friend girlfriend quickly told me to stop the ruckus. By then I was on my merry way on installing windows and setting up the drives and which ones booted first and the XMP profile for my RAM which would be 3000MHz ( I forgot to mention that my RAM's XMP profile of 3000MHz did not work as I put it into the wrong slots..... I figured that out after 2 months..... so yeah shoot me). All in all it was a fun first time build and it did its duty quite well, it would be then by New Years that I would receive newer parts, there was plan to go get a 1070Ti or a 2070 or a Vega card, although it was scrapped due to school commitments. Although it's still not completely off the upgrade table, I'm still thinking of getting a more powerful card, maybe 2019 might give us new AMD GPU's or prices might drop lower on some that I can afford.

But all in all this is the build for now.