I have been building some rather interesting and very powerful PCs these past couple of months.

I had been over 12 years since I last researched and built a PC. 12 or 13 years ago I built a PC from the bleeding edge of technology that ran the latest games with ease. It had dual 1 GB video cards, 8 GB of memory. It is still running, and was my main workstation until I built this one starting in October 2020. The PC parts market is insane right now. It is very difficult to get CPUs and GPUs.



It started out as going to be the case we would use for a couple of builds. Then I ran into some fitment issues with the motherboard so I found another case that lets me be as creative as I desire with cooling options bey they air or water cooled. It will still be used but more for office and development tasks. I bought a smaller, cheaper motherboard and it is currently running an AMD Ryzen 3400G 4 core / 8 thread processor with built-in graphics processor. It has a video card and will probably always have one but it doesn't need one.

I am intrigued by what is know as "Custom Water Loops". Where, you essentially get to combine electronics and plumbing into what can ultimately be the best cooling you can buy, or an unmitigated disaster when your system springs a leak, potentially destroying every electronic component in the PC. FUN! lol

The Lian Li 011 Dynamic XL case won the day. Here is the second of my builds in its current state...



The RGB color scheme can be customized to fit your mood, react to the music you have playing through the system, shift colors, marquees, rainbow unicorn barf, etc. lol Or you can shut it all off. I like setting it to a solid color and dimming it as well. Whatever the mood you happen to be in.

This "Aquarium PC" is built for gaming and racing and flight simulators. It uses the following components.

MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE Motherboard

AMD Ryzen 58006X 8 core 16 thread CPU (a 16 core / 32 thread 5950x is backordered)

ASUS ROG STRIX LC 240 AIO (White) liquid CPU cooler. It is the round, white object with the tubes going to a radiator up top with two PWM/RGB Fans that can really push a lot of air through. Just like a car. As the CPU heats up, the pump and fan speeds increase to regulate the heat and prevent thermal throttling or shutdown.

64 GB DDR4 3600 16/16/16/36 memory

Sapphire AMD RADEON RX 6900XT GPU w/ 16 GB GDDR6 memory (very difficult to buy)

2 x 1TB Samsung EVO PRO 980 m.2 SSD drives. (benchmarked at 5GB per second write speed and 6+GB per second read speed.)

The video card has more total memory than my old workstation which topped out at 12GB ram and 1GB video memory. lol

The sticker on the two center fan hubs is my youngest daughter's etsy shop logo.

Impressive!

I love how you dive headlong into whatever endeavor you undertake.....

I just bought one from Costco. Haven't even taken it out of the box yet. Someone told me to get an I7 rather than an I5 ... the faster I5 machines are about half the price.

I'm mostly looking to get more serious about digital photography. I may try to shovel some more memory into it.

Building and customizing one is so much more fun.

I don't know anything about building computers, but I can tell you it's beautiful!

Yes, it is a lot of fun. I used to do a lot of that, but it was back in the PC/XT and /AT era. I also briefly had a consulting business and built custom machines for people. I did a lot more work on the software, usability, and training side.

Then I got into aeroplanes and drifted away from PCs. I used the same Dell laptop for about 15 years.

That is a big WOW of a machine.

Built a computer in the DOS days.
Interested in the new Microsoft Flight Simulator.
Don't think I would use it enough to justify the $$$$.

Very cool! More power than I need, but definitely impressive.

I remember way back in the day, I would upgrade my computer every time a new MYST game came out. No more!