Coding with Titans

Plan for today: avoid COVID-19, avoid full lock-down and perform e-learning with my children and myself (with this list). Also as a background task few months ago I started slowly moving towards purchasing my new desktop setup to have something to spare in case of deeper and longer e-learning period. This actually happened and was officially announced last week in Poland (till that I had only the older one with me)! So here I am finalizing the project just in time, although pushed a bit. Now both kids are using Microsoft Teams for the win and with one eye they look jealously at me.

Unfortunate and surprising death of my current i7-3770 PC called Tajfun, cased the whole acquisition process to complete even faster. All is done since few days and I am happily playing with new toy. But as I recall, originally I wanted to complete everything during August 2020, but then I heard about new Intel 11-gen CPUs comming out on 2nd September. So waited… Then AMD had Ryzen 5000 with Zen3 architecture announcement behind the corner (8th October)… Decided to wait a bit more… as AMD Ryzen™ 9 5950X was expected to a blast from space and available starting from 5th November. Delayed my decision further… and all chips got sold out in all shops I looked for in 5 mins just after the premiere. Next batch will be available end of December, or end of Q1-2021 or never. Now I said enough with second lock-down on the horizon and went back to Intel!

Components

Parts I’ve chosen (with dates and prices as pure future reference of inflation rates):

1. Case - Fractal Design Vector RS Dark Tempered Glass (FD-C-VER1A-02) - 2020-08-12 - 599 PLN

   Here I explain, how I overcome top-LED panel issues and great response from Fractal Design support.

2. PSU - Seasonic FOCUS GX-750 80+ Gold 750W - 2020-08-03 - 458 PLN

3. Motherboard - MSI MAG Z490 Tomahawk DDR4 s.1200 - 2020-11-09 - 795 PLN

4. CPU - Intel i9-10900KF Comet Lake 3.7GHz s.1200 - 2020-11-09 - 2250 PLN

5. Cooling AIO - MSI MAG Core Liquid 360R 3x120mm - 2020-09-06 - 549 PLN

6. Thermal Paste - Arctic Silver Thermal Paste - Silver 5 3.5g - 2020-01-21 - 35 PLN

7. Additional case cooling - Arctic BioniX F140 PWM PST - 2020-10-05 - 45 PLN

8. Memory - 2x Patriot Viper DDR4 32GB 3200MHz CL16 - 2020-11-09 - 509 PLN (each)

9. Graphic - MSI GeForce GTX 1070 Gaming 8GB GDDR5 - 2019-03-19 - 1399 PLN

   Moved actually from previous setup.

10. Riser - Fractal Design FLEX VRC-25 Riser Cable Kit PCI-e - 2020-08-17 - 199 PLN

11. SSD - 2x Samsung 1TB NVMe 970 Evo Plus - 2020-11-04 - 799 PLN (each)

12. Bluetooth - Baseus Bluetooth Dongle - 2020-11-09 - 22 PLN

13. Keyboard - Razer Ornata Chroma - 2020-09-15 - 269 PLN

14. Mouse Pad - MSI AGILITY GD70 - 2020-09-06 - 69 PLN

15. Headphones - Edifier V4 Stereo Gaming Headset - 2020-08-17 - 109 PLN

16. System - Microsoft Windows 10 x64 OEM PL SP1 - 2020-10-21 - 599 PLN

Assembled

Once most of components are mounted, the build looks like this (glass removed):

Turned on

Finally, powering all LEDs on gives amazing Christmas-tree effect:

It gets even brighter, when light animations are combined and sync with keyboard ;)

Stats

And as the last sort of information CPU benchmarks for yet another reference:

Source: cpubenchmark.net

Please give me some more time and I will update this post with some personal feelings about the overall system performance. Meanwhile have a nice week.

Cheers!

PS.

Many thanks to MSI for granting me Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game through this promo.