I have been using my old computer for just about three years, which follows my pretty standard upgrade cycle of every three or so years. My last real upgrade being 2018 when I picked up the Ryzen 7 2800x.

All my computers in the past have almost always been built with compromises, either because at the time I didn't need anything crazy or financially couldn't really afford it.

Well, I wanted to go about it different this time because for once I'm in a good spot to really build something I consider an no-compromise computer.

One of the biggest changes for me compute wise was my shift into using a VFIO setup to play games. This essentially means that I'm running two computers in one, and I was struggling with memory a bit on my previous computer trying to do that (squeezing windows, Linux and a decent sized ZFS arc cache in 32G was a tight fit).

So I wanted a motherboard with good PCIe spacing to support two video cards, excellent IOMMU groups to provide interface isolation for the M.2 drives as well as the GPU for PCI pass-through, a power house CPU to power it all, and plenty of RAM to not have to try and squeeze everything in again.

So without further adieu let me introduce my new computer, Titan.

Full Spec List:

Outside of the Nvidia GPU that I took from my old build, everything else was new:

  • AMD Ryzen 9 5950X
  • ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero
  • G.SKILL Trident Z Royal Series 3600 128GB
  • 2x 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVMe Drives (One dedicated to Windows and one to Linux)
  • NZXT Kraken X73 AIO Cooler w/ LL ST120 Fans
  • Corsair HX1200 PSU
  • SAPPHIRE Toxic Radeon 6900XT GPU (Gaming/Windows)
  • Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1660Ti GPU (Linux)
  • LIAN LI PC-011 Dynamic Case

Overall I'm extremely happy with the computer and glad I pulled the trigger on it. There's really only a handful of remaining items I want to take care of:

  1. Replace the bottom Nocturna fans with another set of LL ST120s for even more obnoxiously bright LED action
  2. Replace the absolute MESS of dual end PCIe power cables to the video card with single ended cables
  3. I might replace the 1TB NVMe drive dedicated to windows with a 2TB one, as games are fucking huge these days.