A New-ish PC Build for 2024
It was time to update my PC as I've been using the same components for nearly 5 years, and have been using the same Corsair case since 2016. I went with the Antec C8 case with wood trim, which was a nice upgrade from the Corsair. Initially I was eyeing the Corsair version of a dual-chamber case, but after they declined two different credit cards for unknown reasons, I discovered the Antec version which looks great and was significantly cheaper.
For this build I did reuse my existing M.2 drives, and my RX 7900 XT GPU which wasn't that old.
I also ended up ditching the RME AIO audio card this time, because I just don't use it enough, and figured that when mixing 96kHz recording sessions Pipewire will resample on the fly for me... I won't notice (I'm in my forties now after all), and the internal mixing in Mixbus will still of course be happening at 96kHz. So instead of a quality on-board audio solution, I'm using my Allen & Heath Zed mixer via USB, which is class compliant so it works flawlessly in Linux.
After doing the initial build and deciding to remove the RME card, I realized I had room for a vertical GPU mounting bracket. So I got one from Cooler Master, along with some ASUS Aura-compatible RGB strips, to really make the build pop -- I had intentionally avoided any components with built-in RGB because I wanted to do an "indirect lighting" thing. I love the results:
And of course thanks to OpenRGB, the RGB strips change color with my current wallpaper of choice.
It's a bit louder than my previous build, but still pretty quiet and the airflow and temps are amazing when gaming at 4k. I even, you know, set aside some time to actually play a few games and not just run benchmarks.
Component List
Here are the components, including the ones I re-used, with prices as of the time of this post.