With access to all of our test hardware, you might think that I am running the latest and greatest hardware. But that is never the case. Long-time readers may have seen updates on my main PC as it has evolved over the years, starting with our Crush build 10 years ago and its replacement, the Crushed build, which last saw an update in 2021. That setup is a little long in the tooth, especially after upgrading my main display to a large 4K OLED. I’ve been putting off a replacement for a long time now, and of course, it couldn’t be a worse time to do it. But it can’t wait any longer, so let’s dive into our latest build.
Project Name: Project Momentum - Part 1
Written by: Wes Compton
Build Sponsors/Supporters: Fractal Design, AMD, Asus, G Skill, Be Quiet, Silverstone, and Patriot
Amazon Affiliate Links:
Fractal Design North XL Momentum Black
G.Skill T5 Neo Series 128GB 6400MT/s
Links to the rest of the project: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3
If you haven’t seen our previous project builds. Before just diving into the new components, there are typically a list of reasons for a new build and that is definitely the case here. For starters, how I use my PC has changed somewhat. I’ve been doing more video editing, which has slightly different demands compared to the writing and photo editing that I do for writing reviews. So good performance with DaVinci Resolve is important, maintaining good performance with Photoshop and improving the speed of saving PNG files is also a goal as well. Beyond that, I find myself doing a lot of multitasking, watching something on Plex or YouTube while working or gaming. Speaking of gaming, this is one of the areas where my current PC is feeling the most aged. It’s not that it is out of date, the RTX 3080 is still a solid card, but when I built that PC I was gaming at 1440p. I have moved to a large 4k OLED for my main display, and the higher resolution combined with the age has seen some slowdowns. I would also like to be able to take advantage of newer technologies like DLSS 4 and the recently introduced DLSS 5.
Beyond all of those goals, like with past builds, issues have come up that need to be addressed as well. With my previous build, early on the hard drive in the bottom died and getting down into the bottom of the Case Labs case is a pain, so I have ignored it. That limited the amount of storage space I had for games, which with some games taking up a LOT of space has meant a lot of juggling with which games I have had installed. Once again, I have had network issues. This has been an issue that has popped up in the last few builds. The wired NIC on the motherboard died, I’ve changed my home network around trying to see if something was causing it, and this time around I have a few new ideas to hopefully prevent this from happening again. The other issue has been noise, the unique form factor of our Case Labs Bullet case has limited the amount of cooling available, both with AIO water cooling size and overall cooling. This, combined with my goal of keeping my PC quiet has been a challenge and especially recently I’ve been losing that battle. That unique case size is also why I haven’t done any incremental upgrades for a while now. Video cards are a lot larger now, CPUs put out more heat as well, and none of that would fit in this case. Not to mention my desk setup was built around that case size. So I’ve finally made room for a larger modern case. I did seriously consider going with a nice SFF build, but I didn’t want to fight that balance of heat and noise this time around. Not to mention having to take the entire PC apart to replace a dead SSD or hard drive (which is an issue I have had on the last few PCs).
