It’s perfectly possible to go full-blown overclocking with watercooling whilst not buying top of the range parts (which tend to be “twice the price for an extra 10% performance” deals) and not spending a cent in decorative elements such as turning your PC box into a lightshow.
In fact it absolutelly makes sense to get well selected parts from the high middle end of the consumer segment using knowledge about performance bottlenecks to select the right stuff to get more bang for the buck and pumping up performance further with overclocking using the right self-assembled cooling and tweaks to things like voltage supplied to the CPU.
I like to call it Intelligent Performance Aware PC Builder but calling it Tight-fisted Old Gamer would work too ;)
There is a 3rd type.
Those with the “dark horse”.
It’s a smallish black box PC, no RGB, mini-itx sized, sits under the desk, mostly out of sight.
Quiet, well cooled.
Has the latest gen CPU & GPU, oodles of ram and nvme storage.
In the same vein, the ancient Beige Box with the same specs as the Dark Horse. It might not have as good of cooling and might be significantly louder, but it’ll keep up just as well. I had to use two 13,000RPM 80mm server fans for intake and exhaust in mine to cool an i9-12900k
It’s what I have.
Case choice for mini-itx is pretty limited, but it’s getting better. There are group buyins for small run manufacturing, like mechanical keyboards - but I’ve never been involved in one of those.
Not sure if there are any that would fit a 4090, tho!
But I love em!
I have a clean desk, nothing flashing, no risk of a glass side panel exploding.
The builds are a little more challenging and more expensive, but I quite enjoy it. Have to make sure parts fit, cable management has to be spot on, you need decent fans because there are less of them
My pc looks like the first one (clear panel, same LED colors) but I most certainly feel like the second one with my rattling case fan that I never bothered to fix
I’m about to build my first PC, and I’m planning to be in the middle.
I don’t need all the fancy shit I just want to build something (without RGB bullshit) that will last me a long time and run linux flawlessly (so AMD everything?).
I know there are sites that will help with parts/linux compatability but I lost all my bookmarks last week, and I haven’t been able to find it again yet.
If anyone has advice for me or knows that site, I’m all eyes! (Would be “all ears” but this is text lol).
AMD has solid Linux support for most stuff, but if you want reviews of hardware from Linux systems, you can check out Phoronix. If you’re hoping to game, you can also check ProtonDB for crowdsourced reviews and tips on how well specific games designed for Windows work on Linux with Steam’s compatibility layer.
These days, the top. Pretty close to it, too–other than the hardline tubing, that’s about what my gaming setup looks like.
I’ve also ran systems in the past where the “case” is the box the motherboard came in, and you started it by tripping the switch header with whatever piece of metal was handy. Good times.
I’m in between, I like/need my beefy components (for work) but I don’t worship my machine or feel the need to pimp it out, as long as it’s quiet and out of my way and provides the performance I’m happy. That’s why I have 0 RGB and use a big ass noctua fan instead of water-cooling.
I was the bottom, but finally going to be the top this week! Just purchased everything to build my first new one since 2016. The 2016 one was me buying decent stuff but mostly mid range. This time I feel like I went mostly top tier outside some things (although some stuff says mid range which I don’t get). Although I still don’t care how the pc looks, I am one of the few that hates RGB and purchased everything I could without it. I took it so far that I got myself Noctua fans. Yes, I really don’t care that my pc will look brown beige inside, at least I know it will be quiet and cool which is all that really should matter!
Thanks! Been eyeing up AMD CPUs for years, but didn’t want to get involved with the GPU shortage price nonsense. After the news broke for last week’s new GPU drop I figured it’s about as good as it will get until next year. Got everything and waiting on the new rx 7800 xt to come in 2 days.
Should be a huge leap coming from my last build which revolved around an rx 480. I did love that card and it still runs great non stop since 2016. Handing it down to my son which will be his first pc.
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