This old man built his first gaming PC in 15 years. This isn't every step I did, just the more interesting ones. They are somewhat in order though.

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Timothias 18 hours ago

Parts not from NewEgg:
https://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-32gs95ue-b-gaming-monitor
https://www.in-win.com/en/ibuild-ishare/dubili
https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/microphones/mv6?variant=MV6
https://www.shure.com/en-US/products/headphones/srh1540?variant=SRH1540-BK

Parts FROM NewEgg:
2) Noctua NA-SC1 Sx2, 3-Way Fan Splitter Cables, 4-Pin PWM (2-pack, 13cm, Black)
Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (USB)
SteelSeries Rival 3 Gen 2 Gaming Mouse
SteelSeries Apex Pro Mini HyperMagnetic Gaming Keyboard
SteelSeries QcK 63842 Cloth Gaming Mousepad
Seasonic VERTEX GX-1200, 1200W 80+ Gold, ATX 3.0 & PCIe 5.0 Ready
9) Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM, Premium Quiet Fan, 4-Pin (120mm, Brown)
Noctua NH-D15 G2 LBC, Dual Tower CPU Cooler
Team Xtreem 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6000 (PC5 48000) Desktop Memory Model FFXD532G6000HC30DC01
Team Group T-FORCE G70 PRO (Aluminum) M.2 2280 2TB PCIe 4.0 x4 with NVMe 1.4 TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) TM8FFH002T0C128
ASRock X870E TAICHI AM5 AMD X870E Extended ATX Motherboard
ASRock Taichi Radeon RX 9070 XT 16GB GDDR6 PCI Express 5.0 x16 Graphics Card RX9070XT TC 16GO
AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D - Ryzen 7 9000 Series Zen 5 8-Core 5.2 GHz - Socket AM5 120W - AMD Radeon Graphics Desktop Processor - 100-100001084WOF

Boy components got heavier, motherboards and video cards especially.

If you are going to order a chassis from the InWin Amazon store it's going to take 2+ weeks to get to you.

I like a large metal chassis (preferably aluminum) because they seem to help the system run cooler. More colder air mass in the chassis also helps.

Ordering from NewEgg was pretty good, but they broke the total amount up over 3 different charges to my card. This set my credit card company off and they declined them the first time.

I took pictures of the boxes when they arrived and before I moved them. Usually the shipper also had a picture of the box in the delivery confirmation and I kept that too in case of damaged parts. I also took videos of me opening the boxes and inspecting the components being sure identifying numbers were visible in the video. Fortunately everything was in good shape.

Building took about 5 hours but I was being slow and reading all of the manuals. I was also organizing what was left over to keep in case I needed to return it, or use it later.

I installed the fans in the chassis, then the PSU. I checked PSU operation by using the included tester and making sure a fan spun up.

I have 9 120mm Fans mounted in the chassis, 5 in, 4 out, the bottom and front fans blow in, and the top and back fans blow out. This helps to keep positive pressure in the chassis which helps with dust and temperatures.

Asrock has earned the nickname "murderboards" and I read about that after I ordered the parts. Before I socketed the CPU I "Flashbacked" the bios to the latest available at the time (3.4 from early September 2025). You have to use a USB drive formatted fat32 with an MBR partition type and it must be at least 32GB in size. There is a Specific USB port to do this from. My board is the usb port under the network jack.

I mounted the motherboard in the chassis then populated it with cpu, drive and ram. Lots of people say populate it then mount it.

The SSD I bought comes with a heatsink that you can attach. The motherboard I have has an integrated heatsink so I just used that. So far so good.

Noctua's NH-D15 G2 LBC is expensive, but it had everything I needed. Paste, the long screwdriver, a thermal paste guard which was pretty cool, the paste, a syringe, and some cleaning wipes. It had mounts for AMD and Intel Sockets too. I read about people using OLD coolers, and emailing Noctua asking about what mounts to use, and Noctua sending them for free. I did the 4 outer small dots and middle pea size dots, temps are pretty good so I guess I did it right. I had to move the "front" fan up a little bit so it would fit over the ram. The ram I used is taller.

The front panel IO's were pretty straight forward connecting to the motherboard. I remembered having to play jumper bingo the last time.

Powered on and booted to Windows setup on the first try. =D

When installing Windows be sure you are installing to a UEFI partition (which 11 does by default I believe) When you are trying to enable re-sizeable BAR later this will matter. It was enable already on my board out of the box.

After Windows first boot, I got a prompt from the motherboard firmware asking if I wanted to install the drivers. I thought that was pretty cool. There are a lot of people who don't like that though.

I had to tell the motherboard it was in deployed mode in the firmwar, reboot then enable secure boot in the firmware before I could bitlock the system. Print a backup copy of your bitlocker key and keep it safe and accessible in case the system decides to protect itself.

I installed the latest drivers from AMD for chipset and GPU.

Ryzen CPU's are a bit funky about the ram they use. Even though the system has 4 ram slots, you should only use 2 sticks. The sweet spot is 2 16GB sticks of ram running at 6000 MT/s and CL 30. Trying to expand this is seen as not worth the effort. I enabled expo after a week or so of running at default/stock settings and it worked like a champ. Some people prefer to manually set these. I have not done any undervolting or other tweaks to the system firmware. You should really run the system at stock/defaults for a while before beginning to tweak. When you do start remember to make one change at a time, document it, and make baby steps.

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Showing 1-9 of 9 comments

Electric Cupcake 18 hours ago

I wasn't aware Motherboards are much heavier than they used to be. On the contrary, microATX is pretty light, and there isn't much reason to get a full ATX one unless you need a bunch of extra heatpipes and sinks.

Agenda 2025 18 hours ago

Congrats Op! Love InWin cases.

Monk 18 hours ago

Not how I would of spent my money (mainly motherboard), but a good build and great headphones, I would suggest you look at picking up a dac/amp to make the most of them.

The dolby atmos for headphones app from the store is worth checking out to (only costs 10 bucks but also has a 7 day trial).

Good luck.

Bad 💀 Motha 18 hours ago

Originally posted by Electric Cupcake:
I wasn't aware Motherboards are much heavier than they used to be. On the contrary, microATX is pretty light, and there isn't much reason to get a full ATX one unless you need a bunch of extra heatpipes and sinks.

Sure there is, more drives. Can't have enough. I for one don't like to have to rely on a USB drive for everyday use needs. Whether it be SATA or NVME I like having 3 - 5 internal drives. Especially now that it greatly helps to have your internal drives be SSDs. I don't need a HDD when I bave a NAS for that.

Electric Cupcake 17 hours ago

Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:
Originally posted by Electric Cupcake:
I wasn't aware Motherboards are much heavier than they used to be. On the contrary, microATX is pretty light, and there isn't much reason to get a full ATX one unless you need a bunch of extra heatpipes and sinks.

Sure there is, more drives. Can't have enough. I for one don't like to have to rely on a USB drive for everyday use needs. Whether it be SATA or NVME I like having 3 - 5 internal drives. Especially now that it greatly helps to have your internal drives be SSDs. I don't need a HDD when I bave a NAS for that.

PCIe card can handle that.

Bad 💀 Motha 17 hours ago

Yes it's doable I just prefer not to bother with tba. MicroATX usually don't have the better chipset and meant for the better CPUs. Which is strange considering you can get a high end ITX board

x 9 hours ago

Originally posted by Electric Cupcake:
Originally posted by Bad 💀 Motha:

Sure there is, more drives. Can't have enough. I for one don't like to have to rely on a USB drive for everyday use needs. Whether it be SATA or NVME I like having 3 - 5 internal drives. Especially now that it greatly helps to have your internal drives be SSDs. I don't need a HDD when I bave a NAS for that.

PCIe card can handle that.

In theory, but you get so many varying results from it.
I myself don't need a big drive. Just a place to install games and apps. I have a cloud service and use it as a big "drive". Obviously I wouldn't run programs from it... well, this one time I installed something on my p: drive by mistake. p: drive is my cloud's drive letter. It was a small piece of software and it worked. But suspiciously slow. Got me a few laughs when I found out.
Anyway, any form of local disk... I don't trust. Had many HDDs die on me over the years. Pretty much went for CDs, later DVDs and now a nice cloud service. It's not cheap, but neither are NAS and drives. As long as it's a good redundant system with proper security and user side encryptions, it's good. Will you lose everything if the world ends? Yeah, but that will be the least of you concerns...lol