One of my friends contacted me about building a new PC. He'd supply the parts and some emotional support and spare hands, and I'd build the thing. I agreed on the condition of not assuming any responsibility – I'm not a professional after all.
He rocked up with the parts. I don't have the exact specs, but it is a 13th gen i5 paired with an RTX 4070. There is also a 360 mm AIO. The case is some sort of Fractal Meshify RGB if I'm not mistaken.
There were two major hurdles in the build process:
The AIO was either tooled with ridiculously bad tolerances or shipped with the wrong screws. At the start, the supplied imperial screws simply didn't go into their respective holes, but my spare metric ones did just fine. Too bad the screws needed to be of the included extra long variety, so we needed to make the imperial ones work. We ended up re-tapping the holes with a sacrificial imperial screw. The delay with the screws made the build take two nights instead of one. This being my first first-hand experience with water-cooling, I'm not very impressed, although the complete build is silent and cool.
This was also my first experience with modern RGB. Holy hell the cables! How is anyone managing to cable manage a build like this? We succeeded in chaining all the RGB fans together and feeding the chain to the case's built-in RGB controller (really just a SATA-powered RGB header with a dedicated color-cycling button) and hiding the rat's nest behind the wall.
The first thing the build did when complete was tripping my fuse… That turned out to just be an overload, as the PC behaved just fine alone in the circuit after resetting the fuse. All in all, the end-result turned out okay, I think.
the finished build
This post was retroactively compiled on 2024-01-05 from a photo in my photo library.
