My Gaming Setup!

Hey!

My name is Jan and today I want to present you my entire gaming setup. 

Just like my older PC, this is an all AMD System. I will go through almost every element of my PC, as well as peripherals, which aren't really astonishing but they still are a huge upgrade from where I came from earlier. 

• The Case: Phanteks P400S Black Acrylic Window

I really love this case, although the temperature is a bit higher than in my older system, which featured a lower-end but airier Bitfenix Shinobi Windowed. The noise dampening material on the P400S does a great job at stopping most of the annoying high-frequency sounds, such as coil whine. So all I hear is a gentle humming noise in idle. The graphics card is definitely hearable under full load, but that can be adjusted via software. Designwise the P400S is one of the nicest cases out there in that price range along the NZXT S340.

• The Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty B350 Gaming K4

There is not much to say about this motherboard. It packs a lot of connectivity into that budget of under 100€ back when I bought it. I needed a lot of USB connectors due to my hobby and thus, a lot of external devices to be hooked up to my PC most of the time and this motherboard was the cheapest to support all those devices. Also, I had good experiences with my last ASRock Board. The colour scheme matches the rest of my build and the AMD colours, although I would've wished for the chipset glow to be RGB as well.

• The CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 

With Ryzen AMD really surprised everyone in the tech industry and set new standards for the price-to-performance ratio, especially in multi-threaded workloads. It was a nice upgrade from my FX6300, that began to slow me down in some tasks like live streaming or heavier game titles. The R5 1600 opened a new world of possibilities with its 6 cores and 12 threads. I used the stock cooler for quite a long time, in fact, I only upgraded to another cooler last week. I'll show you both the stock cooler, which is fantastic in its look, performance and noise, as well as the new aftermarket cooler. I upgraded to an EKL Alpenföhn Ben Nevis Advanced Black RGB (That's the hell of a long name, huh?).

• The GPU: Powercolor AMD Radeon RX580 Red Devil Golden Sample

Behind another tremendously long product name is my GPU. These models are harder to find now than baby unicorns, and that's why I love it even a bit more. I was lucky to have gotten it for MSRP a few days before they all sold out nation-wide. The Golden Sample is a more or less binned model compared to the normal Red Devil. And I believe it features a bigger cooler as well. I didn't bother overclocking it yet since the performance is more than enough for the games I play in 1080p. As mentioned before, the card is loud under full load, but in idle, in fact, under 60°C core temp, the fans do not spin at all! All in all a sexy and fast card for my needs.

• The rest of the system: PSU, RAM, Fans, HDDs

Since I do not want to get every single screw of my system I will discuss the smaller components in a paragraph altogether. My power supply is a Corsair RM650i. It also features semi-passive cooling, so under low load, the fan stands still. For the RAM I am using a single stick of 8GB DDR4 memory by Crucial, I am planning to upgrade the second one of those in the future. Also, I am running it at 2666MHz instead of the 2400MHz it ships with. My case fans are the two pre-installed Phanteks fans, as well as two Bitfenix Spectre Pro Red LED in the front.  My data is saved on a 2TB SSHD by Barracuda as well as a 1TD HDD by Western Digital.

• The peripherals: Monitors, Keyboard and Mouse

I run a dual monitor setup. My main monitor is an ASUS VG245H. It features FreeSync and a 75Hz panel, which feels awesome for fast games. My secondary monitor is a more standard AOC E2460H with a normal 60Hz TFT-Panel. My keyboard is part of the Cooler Master Masterkey Combo Lite, but I replaced the mouse with a Roccat Kova. As a mousepad, I am using a big 90cm by 30cm one from inateck, probably some Asian brand.

This sums it up for today! What does your PC look like? Are you running on a notebook? Feel free to share your workspace!

Thanks for reading,

Jan