My New Machine...

[Major Lee]

I built a new PC early last year. My old Windows 7 machine was just so slow and very old, and I really wanted to run a modern version of my video software. I researched modern parts and looked for sales. This is what I built:

Gigabyte Z790 Eagle AX motherboard

Intel i14700k cpu

Corsair Vengeance 64gb DDR5 5600mts

EVGA Supernova platinum power supply

Primary Drive: Western Digital SN850X 1TB (Windows 11 Pro, video, graphics, utility programs)

Game Drive: Gigabyte Aorus Gen4 2TB (flight sims, games, recreational programs, DLC storage)

Project and Working Drive: Cardea A440 2TB (video and picture storage, media project files, new finished projects)

TWO Seagate Firecuda 4TB HDD, 7200 rpm, 256mb, back up and storage.

Asus RTX4070 12GB video card

Soundblaster AE7 soundboard

Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 THX speakers

Arctic Freezer 36 black cooler with frame mount.

Pioneer bluray for my existing movie collection. 

The pictures below show the end result. I wanted really work on cable management and have everything clean and tidy. I got some colored power cables to help with that.  After I assembled the machine, I really didn't like the USB F-header sticking cables out perpendicular to the mobo, obstructing airflow. I thought "man, it would be great if someone made a 90° header". And then I realized I should just look on Amazon...

I really lucked out on the timing of this build. After I got it done, PC parts prices began to climb like a rocket, especially RAM. The memory I bought was $165; it is now $919 on Newegg. I guess I should have just bought RAM as an investment.

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Major Lee
Added information

[Major Lee]

I have used the Vegas series of video editing software for many years. I wanted to run the then current Vegas Pro 22, which simply wouldn't run on my old underpowered Win7 machine. 

I did a little comparison test of my new machine and the old(!) one. I took a video project that I made in Vegas 12 Pro, and rendered it again on my old machine. This short music video of a song at a school concert was 4'11" in length. The old machine took 17 minutes to render via GPU. I ran the exact same project file on the new machine with Vegas 22 Pro. Using the CPU for rendering took about 90 seconds. Switching to the GPU, got me down to 35 seconds! So, my new machine on CPU is 11 times faster the old machine on GPU, and rendering only took 35 seconds on GPU, which is 29 times faster! I'm OK with that performance, for sure!

I installed Glarry Utilities, and got boot time down to 8 seconds. I used Rufus to strip Windows11 of corporate bloatware and unwanted features.