New PC Build for 2023

After six years of loyal service, my PC that I built in 2015 was finally showing signs of aging. It couldn’t keep up with the latest games and it was begging for an upgrade. The i7-5930K was a beast of a CPU in it's day, but it had limits on over-clocking, which was common for the Haswell-E server-based processors, even with water cooling.

I was eager to start a new build with the following components:

• Cooler Master Silencio S400 Micro-ATX Tower
• Seasonic FOCUS GX-1000, 1000W 80+ Gold
• Fractal Design Aspect 120mm RGB Fan (case back)
• Fractal Design Aspect 140mm RGB Fan (case top)
• Intel Core i7-13700K Fractal Design Lumen S28 v2 RGB Water Cooler
• ASUS Prime Z790M-Plus motherboard
• Kingston FURY Beast RGB DDR5 6000 Kit (2x16GB)
• WD_BLACK SN850X NVMe M.2 2TB PCI-Express 4.0 x4
• Windows 10 Professional
• LG WH16NS40 Super Multi Blue Internal SATA 16x Blu-ray Disc Rewriter
• GIGABYTE WINDFORCE GeForce RTX 4070 12GB video card
• Misc hardware (Cables, ARGB hub other hardware)

The case specifications said it could fit a 319mm video card, but I failed to account for the space eaten by the front mounted radiator and fans, which stole about 25mm of that. That left me with only about 292mm for the video card. I had to ditch my plan of buying the RTX 4070 Ti card I had drooled over and decided to stick with the GTX 1070 Superclock I had from the old system until I find something that meets my performance standards and fits in the space available.

The video card industry is as fairly reliable in releasing new products and variations on existing products every few months. But I was in for a surprise, when only two weeks after I decided to wait for something better than the RTX 3070 cards that fit my case but did not wow me at all, rumors started to spread like wildfire about the upcoming release of the RTX 4070. The leaked information on paper looked amazing with performance that matched the RTX 3080 and was pretty close to the RTX 4070 Ti in terms of performance. The leaked information also had photos of dual fan cards that would fit my case and a fair price point of $600, which is a bargain compared to the next level up. Another week later, the embargo lifted, and I devoured the benchmarks like a hungry wolf to find the best card for my needs and settled on the GIGABYTE WINDFORCE card. The card has a slight overclock and the somewhat more aggressive fan arrangement makes it a cooler running card and was still under 290mm in length. Which is good, because I don’t have room for anything bigger in my tiny case.

Some Photos of the system: