This entry was supposed to go live on December 2023 and it was only published until a year after in 2024.

I was 10 years old when I got hooked with Road Rash on a PC at my neighbour’s house. My parents got me a Toshiba laptop when I was 17 years old and I played some casual games in it from time to time. This laptop served me great for 4 years and then one day during heavy thunderstorms, it got fried due to an electrical surge.

I bought a second laptop — this time a Lenovo with Nvidia 960M graphics inside with my side gig money. This one worked for 3 years and I extended 3 more years by changing its internal disk to SSD. By this time, I also had a 13-inch macbook pro from work and since it’s unix based, it became my goto for all development work.

I then bought two more mac devices (2018 Macbook Pro and 2023 M2 Mac Mini), but the urge to build myself a desktop PC was still there and I wanted to build a PC myself. Currently, Mac Mini works great for my development work and for some cracked sessions in Factorio, but some good games like Cities Skylines, Stronghold Crusader series, Anno 1800 and other castle simulation RTS games were only available on PC.

I had some free time in December and thought I could build a PC for the holidays. I stumbled upon GamersNexus and lurked on IndianGaming discord for research and clarified some of my questions with the community. Since I already had a 4k monitor (Dell Ultrasharp U2720Q), I wanted to build a system that can comfortably handle at least 1440p. So, after tons of research this is my parts list:

Component Part Price
Motherboard Gigabyte B650M Gaming X AX Wifi ₹17,700
CPU AMD Ryzen 7800X3D ₹34,600
PSU Corsair RM850e ₹10,500
Memory Corsair Vengeance DDR5 32GB 6000Mhz (16*2) ₹9,500
SSD Samsung 980 Evo 1TB ₹8,750
GPU Sapphire Pulse 7900XT 20GB ₹81,900
Cabinet Corsair 4000D Airflow Black ₹6,550
CPU Cooler Deepcool AK620 120MM ₹5,475
  Total (excluding shipping) ₹1,74,975

If you’re building a PC in India, you should definitely visit pcpricetracker to compare prices between multiple PC parts online retailers. Amazon was costly even with a 5% discount from Amazon Pay card. You should also check with offline retail stores in your cities. I got most of the parts from an offline retail store in Coimbatore. The cabinet and the CPU cooler that I wanted were not available in that store, so I had to order online at PC Studio.

After all the parts arrived, I unpacked all the parts. I knew it will take a lot of patience, so I prepared everything for the BIOS POST.

unpacked parts unpacked parts on the floor. in hindsight, doing it on the floor was a mistake.

I started setting up the motherboard, RAM, PSU and the CPU. I saw the BIOS POST and then proceeded with the usual build. After mounting the CPU cooler, NVMe drive, GPU and some cable management, it was ready. All worked well after boot and sadly when I was closing the side glass panel of the cabinet, I dropped 5cms above a hard surface and it cracked.

shattered glass panel of the cabinet shattered glass panel of the cabinet

When I looked this up on the internet, I realized it’s one of the newbie mistakes the new builders make. Fortunately, Corsair support was kind enough to send a replacement without any charges even after I offered to pay them. Thanks Corsair. Till the replacement came I used a cloth to seal the cabinet. Anyway, this is the final build after spending 4 hours on it.

final image of the cabinet final image of the cabinet. sorry i didn’t take any pictures in-between.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it? Okay, there are no fancy RGBs, but it gets the job done. Now I’m playing all the games at 4k and the system handles it very well. I just wish I have more time to game :).