Building my new PC - Going back to AMD and feeling good about it

After a long time away from PC build and only using Intel notebooks... I'm home

When it comes to software development, I need a good keyboard, a good mouse and nice set of screens. And I managed to have all that in the last years because I got a good notebook (Lenovo Z710) and a decent docking station (Toshiba Dynadock U3.0). I was able, with them, to use up to 3 screens without much hassle. I mean… It was great for working while not very good for gaming.

But it all changed last week, when I finally built my desktop computer. It’s been 15 years I’ve done it from scratch so I was quite worried that I would do something wrong. Besides, since I wasn’t really following the hardware advances over the years, I had to catch up with a lot of new stuff in order to build something decent.

The original plan was to go with the combo Intel/Nvidia, but I was a bit concerned with the price. Also, the release of AMD’s Zen 2 made me rethink my strategy, so I ended up going full AMD.

Specifications

Processor: AMD Ryzen 7 3700X
Cooler: AMD Wraith Prism (comes with the processor)
Mother board: MSI X570-A PRO
Graphic card: Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 8G
HD: Crucial P1 3D NVMe PCIe M.2 1TB
RAM: Kingston HyperX DDR4 3200 C16 2x8GB
Case: SilentiumPC Regnum RG4T Pure Black

The building process was relatively ok even though I am very rusty with hardware, but everything ended well. After installing everything I needed and tweaking the memory in the BIOS for optimum performance, I made a couple of tests and I have to say that I am very happy with the result. The pc runs smooth and the temperature is always in a good level.

Performance

The overall performance is much better than expected: Opening and using the Visual Studio 2019 has been a breeze, the debug times decreased considerably and playing games has been a pleasure. Especially now that I can finally use the 3 screens in the same graphic card without a dock as workaround.

So far, I didn’t feel the need for overclocking but I don’t really see it happening anytime soon. But in case that happen I will probably use the Performance Boost Overdrive just to make things easier.