Sooo, Monster Hunter Wilds is releasing at the end of the month. I built a new computer to be able to play it, but also not solely just for that… Still, there were other options, like buying a PlayStation 5. However, I’m boycotting Sony for a variety of reasons, plus it’s been 6 years since building my last PC. And back then, it wasn’t like I used top-of-the-line brand new parts.

A few weeks ago, I visited a few PC parts stores in the nerd district and a lot of the GPUs were sold out… Then when I went a couple weeks ago, ALL of the 4070s were gone, which got me into panic mode. 😬 I secured one of the few regular old 4070s still available online and then just ordered other required parts. They came the very next morning, so I went back to nerd town to get the remaining stuff like a PSU, ram, and SSD. 💸

I installed a 2TB SSD, and the mother board had a heat sink shield thing for it. I was wondering how it’d work since there was a sticker on the SSD, but apparently those are fine directly contacting the heat sink. One scary issue was the fan placement of the CPU cooler because it covered the top of the first ram stick. 🫥 However, all I had to do was put the fan on the other side instead, making sure that the airflow went out the right way.

Installing the GPU was funny. I was freaking out since it wouldn’t go in and I didn’t want to force anything. Then I took a good look at it and saw that there was a little plastic cover. 🫠 Oops.

Once I carefully plugged everything where they needed to go, I turned it on for the first time and was pleasantly surprised to see that it immediately posted. This was my third time building a PC and before I’d always have to troubleshoot. At this point, the only issue was that the rear fan didn’t light up.

Turns out, NZXT basically forces you to buy a controller separately??? It may be around $35, but in Japan it’s effectively $85… The HARDEST pass. It had a power cable and an RGB cable that would fry the lights and stuff if I plugged it into the mobo. The 3-in-1 NZXT brand fan at the top of the PC worked no problem because they have an aRGB cable, but the small single rear fan doesn’t. I ended up buying a cheaper RGB fan from a different brand along with an aRGB splitter cable. The CPU cooler takes up one plug, and the fans take up two, but my mobo only has two, so the splitter was necessary.

I also managed to plug the HDMI cable into the mobo instead of the GPU at one point… Just like what I accidentally did the last build lol Honestly, embarrassing, but crisis averted.

But when I turned the PC back on, all of the fan lights worked! It’s always something, though. They were the default rainbow color, and the Gigabyte control center wouldn’t detect them or let me change the colors anymore. Sooo, I ended up uninstalling that program and installing one called SignalRGB, which allowed me to get all the RGB stuff synced. 👍

I’m currently waiting for a glass side panel to arrive so that I can replace the default mesh one. It’s nice seeing the CPU temps and load on the cooler, and you can see the GPU temps right in the app as well. Since the case is so small, there isn’t really anywhere to hide the cables. I kind of just consolidated what I could using some of those twisty wires and shoved them to the back.

Unfortunately, I’m still using Windows 11. For now, I just can’t be bothered to learn a new OS and troubleshoot the inevitable issues… The only other issue I had was installing Office. The sneaky snakes force a subscription on you now? Thank god for the saints on GitHub is all I have to say to that…

Unlike my old PC, the new one ran the Monster Hunter Wilds benchmark without crashing. And since then, I got to play the demo on Ultra with perfectly fine frame rates.

New monitor with a decent refresh rate and 1440p later, and, voila! Everything is finished. The PC is a beast, for my usage case, even without the latest or most expensive parts.