Never built a PC before, but thought it was a good time to get started on it!
I already got the tower, CPU and motherboard. Someone was getting rid of that specific tower and they wanted it gone - it was basically free! (aka a glorified curbalert)
I chose that CPU cause I don’t want to spend money on a GPU, yet. Not looking yet into AAA gaming, at most I’ll start with my Steam indie backlog 😁
Thanks!
I’m old school, I wouldn’t spend a bunch on a liquid cooler unless I was going to overclock and do random high intensity stuff with it. I use a Noctua fan and never have issues, and I’ve got a chunky GPU in a pretty small case too. Still, fun setup! I hope you have a blast! Make sure the motherboard is flashed to the latest level for the CPU, or that you have a way to get that done, like a friend with an older CPU you can hijack for an afternoon. I had to do that with my first Ryzen. The store lent me an Athlon for a deposit.
AIOs are just too convenient these days. You can “move” the heat right to the wall of your case and use slower fans for the radiator. They open up a ton of space for more efficient total airflow. After AIOs got refined after the first few generations, I am never going back to air cooling my CPU again. (I don’t “power overclock” anymore, but I’ll still kick my clocks up a little if it’s 100% stable.)
I debated a quality water loop for my last build but I couldn’t justify the maintenance time. (Cost is not a huge factor, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still want one…)