I recently built my own PC after sourcing components from Amazon UK, Amazon Germany and Currys PC. This was my third PC build and it has two main tasks: gaming and coding. I still play PC games whenever I get time and I’m hooked to Valorant. I was never a fan of multiplayer games but this one hits different. I also play Metro Exodus, SIFU and Cyberpunk 2077.
These games were pretty intense and I liked playing at 1080p with moderately high settings. I was all set to buy the AMD 5600x coupled with an AM4 motherboard when Intel comes out with a monster, the 12th generation of Intel processors. Mind you, I wouldn’t have thought for a second about getting an Intel processor based on their previous launches, but this one was at a whole new level. The benchmarks showed that it beat the previous generation i7-11700K and the current 5600x and 5800x and even traded blows with the 5950x which was twice the price of the 12600K.
After this came the biggest headache of my life. Finding a Z690 chipset motherboard was not easy nor was it cheap. I settled for the ASUS Z690M Prime D4 motherboard, that ticked most of the boxes, and most importantly, fit my budget. Amazon handled the shipment with utmost care (sarcasm), that the edge of the motherboard was bent ever so slightly. I asked in a Reddit thread whether it was alright and most of them said yes, so I went ahead with it. Usually motherboards can flex to an extend since they are designed that way, and this looked harmless. But all my components still hadn’t arrived, so I couldn’t check whether it worked.
Then came the rest of the supplies. I went for 16 gigs of Kingston Fury DDR4 3200MHz RAM, RM750x 80+Gold PSU, AeroCool AeroOne Mini cabinet, Samsung 980 500GB SSD, Seagate BarraCuda 2TB HDD and lot of case fans from Arctic. I didn’t go for the graphics card yet, since the prices were absurd and the 12600K had integrated graphics present. Surprisingly, the first boot was successful, and it was the best feeling ever (every single time). I installed Windows 11, and the system was good to go. I ran CineBench and some basic benchmarks and it blew threw each one of them. The final test was gaming, but I was waiting for the prices to drop a little.
One fine day, as I was scrolling through GPUs on Currys PC World, I found a Gigabyte Radeon RX 6600XT for about 530€. I didn’t think twice, since I was seeing the same card for 800 or more on Amazon and other websites. Even this price was way above the MSRP of the card, but I didn’t bother. In less than a week, I had the card and it was in my PC itching to be pushed to its limits.
I tried playing God of War even though it has been really buggy since launch. I got over 100fps on high settings. Another game I tried was Metro: Exodus and that gave me over 60 fps at high settings. Valorant, without any caps on the framerate, gave me over 300 sometimes, but I capped it to 120. Overall, I must say I’m proud of this build and it has been chewing away literally anything that I throw at it. It is a very future proof system, so in case I make any upgrades, I will log them here. Thanks for reading through and if you ever need build recommendations, I can help!
Update: May 18 2022 - I got a Samsung 980 EVO 500GB SSD for my old laptop. It had another nVME SSD from Transcend that was not performing well, so I put that in the PC for some additional storage.