Home Lab
Custom PC (2025)
My latest creation does away with all the RGB lighting that my previous build had, instead going for a more discreet aesthetic. To get there, I bought a Fractal Design North case, plus a brand new motherboard, CPU, PSU, 64GB RAM, and an AIO cooler. These new parts were all specifically curated to avoid any RGB lighting, with the exception of the temperature display on the AIO cooler’s CPU mount. Carried over from my previous build was the RTX 3070 GPU and my storage config.
This thing runs like a dream and I love the way it looks, especially how the walnut accents on the front of the case coordinate with my Ikea desk top and my Edifier speakers.
Component List
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core 16-Thread 4.2 GHz |
| GPU | NVIDIA Founders Edition GeForce RTX 3070 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 5200MHz |
| Motherboard | MSI MAG B650 Tomahawk ATX DDR5 Wi-Fi 6E |
| Power supply | Corsair RM850x ATX |
| Storage (boot drive) | Sabrent Rocket 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME SSD |
| Storage (secondary) | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME SSD |
| Storage (tertiary) | Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5” 7200 RPM HDD |
| Case | Fractal Design North, charcoal black |
| CPU cooler | NZXT Kraken 240 AIO |
| Case fans | 3x Noctua NF-F12 iPPC-2000 IP67 PWM 120mm cooling fans |
Custom PC (2020)
This was the first custom PC I ever built myself. I ordered the parts for this in March 2020, literally one week before the whole world went on lockdown due to COVID-19. If I had waited any longer, I might have never gotten these components because suddenly everybody decided to use the pandemic as an excuse to get into gaming, plus the crypto-bros started to buy up all the GPUs, leading to worldwide scarcity and price-gouging. Those were weird days…
I did a fair amount of gaming on this, but I also used it as my video editing/production station when I was recording all the content for my Power BI and SQL courses on edX. It served me really well until 2025 when I replaced it with my newest rig.
Component List
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 3700X |
| GPU | NVIDIA Founders Edition GeForce RTX 30701 |
| Memory | G.Skill Trident Z Neo 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 |
| Motherboard | MSI MPG X570 GAMING EDGE WIFI ATX AM4 |
| Power supply | EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G3 750 W 80+ |
| Storage (boot drive) | Sabrent Rocket 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME SSD |
| Storage (secondary) | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME SSD |
| Storage (tertiary) | Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5” 7200 RPM HDD |
| Case | Corsair iCUE 465X RGB ATX Mid |
| CPU cooler | be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 |
| Case fans | 4x Corsair LL120 RGB 120mm LED PWM fans |
Footnotes
When I originally built this, it had an MSI GAMING X GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER for graphics, but I upgraded to the RTX 3070 in 2022.↩︎