Last Winter's Project this Winter Instead

So here's the deal. My project for last winter was going to be a new gaming machine for myself. My old computer was on its last legs and was a pre-built. Upgrading it wasn't much use and I had an old but venerable Antec 900 case and Rosewill 850 W power supply in the basement. A pair of old 500 Gb hard drives logically linked together make a fine backup solution.

Part of this upgrade was a new monitor with frequency synchronization (to minimize tearing during horizontal sweeps). That meant with Nvidia's G-Sync or AMD's FreeSync.

The former requires proprietary hardware in the monitor. That drives up the price of those monitors (by a couple hundred dollars) and reduces the number and variety of available monitors. So, while Nvidia refused to support the more open standard (which only requires software) and stuck with their proprietary solution, I became more interested in an AMD system.

Last winter, however, AMD didn't make a graphics card that could perform at the level of an Nvidia 1070 or better. So I waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, this past summer AMD released the Vega series of cards that did compare with Nvidia's offerings, albeit with a greater power thirst.

These new cards, however, were quickly snapped up by cryptocurrency miners - instantly driving their prices up hundreds of dollars over their MSRP. I waited some more.

This past fall, Nvidia announced the 1080Ti card and, for several hours after, the price for the Vega cards fell to their intended cost! I snagged a Vega 56 for $399. A couple hours after I did, they shot back up to $600.

AMD also released their new CPUs this past summer. Again, competing successfully with Intel. I went for the sweet spot below the cutting edge and picked up a Ryzen 1700.

I also disassembled my Antec case, cleaned it up, and replaced all the stock fans with LED ones. I also went with an RGB-lit motherboard, CPU cooler (Wraith cooler that came with the CPU), side fan, keyboard, and mouse. Paired that with a 34-inch ultrawide monitor (Freesync) and the end result doesn't look half bad.

So I don't really have a project, yet, for this winter but I finally finished last year's project.

Item	Model
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 1700
MB	GIGABYTE GA-AB350-Gaming 3
RAM	G.SKILL Flare X Series 16GB DDR4 3200
Drive	Samsung 850 EVO 1TB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD
GPU	AMD Vega 56
Monitor	LG 34UC79G-B 34-Inch 21:9 Curved
Keyboard	Logitech G910 Orion Spark
Mouse	Logitech G703 Wireless