PC Upgrade

By sethmsparks

Last month I decided it was time to do a new custom PC build. It wasn’t much on the “budget” side, but I did already have an Nvidia GTX 1070 that I’d picked up last year, so I didn’t have to worry about a GPU.

Here’s a capture from CAM of the system upon completion:

CamImage

Down the left-hand details pane, you’ll see the basic stats.

It’s not an uncommon setup, so I’m not going to run any benchmarks. I’m not overclocked (obv. with the 7700), so no cool water cooler.

Eventually, I’ll add in some LED strips to take advance of the jled port on the mobo, and some LED Corsair Vengeance RAM to brighten up the guts a bit. Oh, and the case is last year NZXT s340 (last year’s model, of which the new came out 10 days after I completed this build.)  Even for being last year’s model, I do love this case. The cabling options are great, I’ve never had a box that looked this clean.

[picture incoming]

The primary reason for the build was handling HD video for editing in Premiere. As I seem to be doing more and more video work lately, both professionally and personally, my old rig just wasn’t keeping up. I picked up the GPU last year to help out my six-year-old i7-870, and it did its job for gaming, but the system still struggled to keep up on big video file renders.

Alas, a new beefy desktop that should last another 6 years. Also, building a PC is so much more fun and rewarding than buying one. But if you’ve read this far, you already knew that.