I’m calling this one PC20

to celebrate twenty years of building PCs. Hard to believe I built my first computer in 2005, but it’s true. I had some money saved from a restaurant job and wanted to spend it on something cool. Back then, you could actually build a pretty decent rig for under $1000. My first machine played Half-Life 2. Yep. Anyway…

This new build has 32 (!) GB of DDR5 RAM and a Ryzen 7700X processor—eight cores, sixteen threads. The motherboard is a basic Gigabyte (not AORUS), but I never go for fancy motherboards. It’s got a Gen 4 1TB SSD from Western Digital, which should be plenty of storage for my needs. The graphics card—just arrived—is a Radeon RX 7800 XT. There’s more than enough power there to run PS5/Xbox Series X games at full speed, though whether the PC port is any good is another story.

The PSU is a basic 750-watt model, and the case is reused from my last machine. Cooling is handled by a 240mm all-in-one water cooler for the CPU—always a smart upgrade.

I did make one mistake: I accidentally bent the motherboard pins for the front USB ports. Oh well. I’m just running a USB hub to the front of the machine instead, and it works just fine.

It’s a nice computer! Want me to build one for you? Shoot me an email 😄