Don't beat me up too bad but my wife and I decided over the Christmas break to front our son the money to build a new rig. Only because he secured a job over Thanksgiving break and has been working almost non-stop since being home over the Christmas break. So we know he has the means for a down payment and a source of income when he comes home in the Spring. He was very ecstatic and appreciative and showed us his build on PC Part Picker immediately. lol
He was looking at a 4080 but hated the concept of paying "MSRP" knowing it was inflated but the 30 series cards were $100 to $500 more depending on where you found them. He has also read about the fire stories linked to the 40 series cards so that made him leery of them. Overhyped? I don't know but it made him uneasy.
This past Saturday night, I was browsing GPUs and saw a mention that they were in stock direct from NVIDIA. I went to their site and sure enough, they were in stock for $1099.99. He checked it against everything in his build list and it worked so we pulled the trigger. Specs for his new build:
- Case - Lian Li Lancool 216 case (non-RGB)
- Mobo - ASUS ROG Strix X670E-E
- CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 7900X
- GPU - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 Ti
- Ram - G.Skill Ripjaws S5 Series DDR5 6000 (2 x 16GB)
- Memory - Samsung 980 Pro SSD 1TB (x2)
- PSU - Corsair HX1200
- CPU Cooling - DeepCool Liquid Cooler LT720
- Fans: Front - 160mm fans that come with the case (x2)
- Fans: Bottom - Noctua NF-A12x25 PWM Chromax: 120mm (x2)
- Fan: Rear - Noctua NF-A14 PWM Chromax: 140mm
He opted to go the AMD route this time and chose to go minimalistic in regards to RGB. Now the waiting game begins and the constant torture of "did it come yet, has it shipped?", etc. lol