PC Upgrades -
I've been rocking a Ryzen 5 3600 for a while now. I was never super happy with it, especially considering my other components, so I finally decided to upgrade! I was able to get some good Black Friday deals on everything here, so it didn't hurt my wallet as much as it could've.
I went with a Ryzen 7 5800x. It had a really good deal (like 70% off MSRP I think) and I didn't want to pass it up. Yeah it's not AM5, and it's almost just as old as my 3600, but I'm happy with it so far. One thing I didn't realize before buying it is that thing thing runs HOT. It is definitely hotter than the 3600. I have a pretty decent cooling system so I'm not too worried. Thanks to Austin for getting me hooked on tweaking fan curves and monitoring temperatures. This definitely wont stress me out in the future..
I also upgraded my motherboard to a B550-F. I had a weird issue on my B450-F where I couldn't get my RAM above 2133MHz (I tried everything). Now it's running at 3200MHz like it should have been for all these years. Lastly, I upgraded my PSU to an EVGA 750W from a Rosewill 650W. I really like EVGA, but sadly didn't want to drop $700 on an EVGA motherboard (although it would have looked super plasma).
I don't like how the cables for the new PSU look, especially going into the GPU. Before they were flat and almost looked like a set of braided cables. Now they're all round and whatever looking. Maybe I'll get some dumb RGB cables in the future.
This is a picture of the completed build. It looks almost identical to how it looked before but I'm really fond of how this build looks.
Been rocking the white lights only.
I also upgraded my monitor! My ASUS monitors have treated me very well over the years so I decided to stick with them. After using a 1440p ultrawide monitor at work for most of the year now, I've been wanting that resolution at home too. I didn't go ultrawide for the sake of streaming and recording, but I got a deal on some ASUS 1440p 180hz monitor. I don't really care for the jump from 144hz to 180hz, but the change from a 1080p TN panel to a 1440p IPS is wonderful.
Here's an ultrawide photo I took of my whole setup. It was night so everything is dark, but I really have loved this setup. There's nothing I'd really change (minus getting a Herman Miller Embody again). This picture was also before the monitor upgrade, but they are almost identical physically.
One more thing I got was a Logitec Litra Beam. I needed some better lighting for my webcam. This would fit inbetween my monitors well! It turned out to be extremely bright even on the lowest light, so now I just do some bounce light.
Here's the new monitor with some Risk of Rain 2. Cable management will be done ASAP!
Honestly, I was hoping that the new monitor would use the same barrel jack power cable as the last, so that's partially why I went with the exact same design. Sadly, it uses a 110v cable with a built in power supply now, so I will have to tear down my cable management that I havent touched in four years and redo it.
Since I now have basically half a PC lying around, I decided to give Nadali the spare parts. I told her to buy a GPU and some other components so she can game with me! (Also lending her a keyboard, a microphone, Sennheiser HD 598's, and I sold her my old monitor..) She got a bunch of games on the Steam sale, so she is LOADED up. I told her to get Portal 1 and 2 (obviously a good start), Terraria (one of my all time favorites), Risk of Rain 2, and Deep Rock Galactic. Only cost her 26 bucks for all those games!! She's gonna get TF2 once all the parts arrive and then I also got her Minecraft for Christmas last year, so she can play that on her PC.
Quick tangent, but Minecraft runs incredibly well on the M2 Macbook Air. She brings her laptop to my house and we play over LAN. Don't worry though, we will still do this!!
If you look at my setup and wish yours was like it, I got 90% of the stuff over a span of time around three to four years ago. It took me a while to build it all up to where it is. Don't fret if you can't get the latest and greatest. I still have an RTX 3070 and it rocks. My monitor was 1080p for the longest time and I had no issues with it. The most important thing is that you're having fun.
Thanks for reading!!