Is everything else good with the build? Worth checking that your RAM is in the correct slots on the mobo so the sticks are runnign in dual channel, and that the BIOS has them running at the rated speed. If it isn't it's a very quick fix, but ideally a system builder should do that stuff.

Biggest problem other than the WiFi has been needing to turn off the RGB lights on the power button that the 2 year old found fascinating.

So, I built a PC thing. It was fun(ish).

Some of the parts (had to swap the cooler, not compatible):



Just getting started:



All of the parts and some of the cables in place:



The cabling, most difficult bit:



First switch on, worked first time, apart from one fan RGB at the back:



The finished product (need to tidy some cables and put the HD tray back to hide the ones in the bottom of the case, but that can wait):





Took about 5 hours to build and I'm pretty chuffed with the result.

While it was cheaper than buying a pre-built system, all I ended up doing was spending more on higher quality parts so ended up probably paying a bit more than I planned. And no the RGB doesn't change colour.

Yeah, comes with the Be Quiet fans, much easier than trying to daisy chain stuff.

That's excellent work. Love the lighting.

The unicorn vomit needs to stay on the trade show floor, aye.

That's a nice looking system, boris.

I ordered a rip off Alienware at the beginning of January and it looks like it's arriving soon.

It was slightly cheaper than building it myself at the time and I've managed to get some decent discounts thanks to the delays.

3080ti, 9500x with 4 years premium support for £1800. How bad can it be!

@Birdorf - thanks.

There’s no way I could stretch to a 3080ti. Having said that my monitor is only 1440p (ultrawide) so I think I’m in a sweet spot for now. Plus I didn’t want to spend a ton on GFX knowing the 4 series is around the corner so I’ll probably get one of those end of next year.

I’m more than happy with the results though.

Maxed out nearly everything on Metro Exodus and hitting 80+ FPS and even Cyberpunk with all RT on is 50-60, with g-sync you obviously don’t spot any stutter.

The beautiful thing about PC gaming is that you have the choice of what graphical quality vs FPS you would like. Even if your system is a bit long in the tooth, you can still enjoy some very playable gameplay if you just turn settings down. The main thing is to just have a powerful enough CPU to last a good number of years, CPU bottlenecks are pretty rough.

I think £650 was the RRP for the 3080, which was 'low' at the time they announced it. I think the lowest it could reasonably go now would be £700, which I'd be surprised to ever see. I reckon realistically £750 is the lowest we'll get.

I'd love to be wrong though.

What do you mean by optimise it exactly? If you mean maximise its performance then most GPUs and CPUs these days will auto clock up based on temperate to give you most of their potention. You can still do some manual tuning with the likes of MSI Afterburner if you like, but I probably wouldn't bother unless you have some time to kill and feel like messing with it. You probably won't get more than like a 5% improvement.

You can open up Nvidia control panel to set a max framerate, which I would recommend doing to minimise coil whine and power usage. There's some other tweaks you can make in there like DSR which is useful if you're on a 1080p display, but mostly you don't need to touch it.

Oh and obviously just make sure you keep the drivers updated.

Drill some extra air holes in your case

Yeah a lot of cases are honestly awful, like the designers knew nothing about airflow. Gamers Nexus is always a good resource for that -