As a warrior hones and maintains his sword, so too does the PC gamer treat their respective gaming rigs. I recently tried my hand at building my first gaming rig in a few years and the results have been spectacular. Building a gaming computer is a methodical hobby. There’s a special satisfaction that comes with putting together so many parts to make a powerhouse whole, and there’s no better way to know your rig than to build it yourself. It may seem daunting, but all it really takes are patience to prepare, and a steady hand to put it all together.Every build comes with its fair share of instructions sure, but an unforeseeable number of variables makes every build project unique. Here’s the tale of my latest build…

As I hinted at before, the first virtue of PC building is patience. This could not be more true when building a rig all the way out in Honolulu. With no proper PC-component vendors on the island, and exorbitant shipping rates accompanying nearly every online store, my options were pretty much Amazon or bust. It was possibly the longest week and a half of my life, watching those parts arrive one by one in the mail, never knowing if they were going to end up at the bottom of the Pacific, but eventually they all made arrive in my hands safe and sound.

Click the link for the setup’s specs along with some quick thoughts on what I thought of the process.

Here are the full specs for the build:

Case: Corsair Carbide 300R
Power Supply: Corsair CS750M
Processor: Intel Core i7-4790
Motherboard: MSI H97 Gaming 3
Graphics Card: MSI GTX 970
SSD: Kingston Digital 120GB
HDD: WD Blue 1TB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16GB
Monitor: AOC i2367Fh 23-Inch
Keyboard: SteelSeries 6Gv2
Mouse: SteelSeries Sensei

It was a build from scratch to perfection. It’s been nearly 5 years since I last built my own gaming rig, but luckily the skill never really leaves you. In fact, this could have been the easiest build I’ve ever attempted. I was incredibly impressed by the advances made in user-friendliness when it comes to computer components. It used to be that no build was complete without an impromptu blood sacrifice. Now such anguish is but an afterthought thanks to screwless case designs and modular power supplies. This may date my last build a bit, but I had no idea that cases now have the ability to open from pretty much every side available. Simply put, PC component design has taken care of the little things, and that’s gone a long way to making build all the more accessible. The only real trouble came with trying to fit everything around the behemoth of a graphics card that is the GTX 970.

I remember when it took a fistful of zip ties to get the inside of a PC case looking this good. Now it all comes with the sexiness pre-built-in.

This computer was an absolute joy to put together from start to finish. PC gaming is an ever-evolving hobby, where much of the fun comes with continuously finding different hardware tweaks/additions to keep your rig on top of the newest games. It’s an ongoing challenge to wring every last bit of power you can from your setup, adjusting every setting down to each individual fan speed. Now with the computer itself built and humming along, the only job left to do is break it in and see what it can do.