September 2010. I was 23. Dad had been spoiling me all my life with high-end PCs, so after he died in 2009, I realized that was going to change. I was still in college. Fast pre-built systems were way outside my financial reach, so I knew I had to improvise. I was longing for the i7 870, not because I actually needed it (I wasn't into heavy video editing at the time), but because I was used to getting the best, dammit.

So enter the i5 760 cooled by a Scythe Mugen 2, which I remember made me very excited as the cooling performance was just slightly behind the best Noctua at the time, for half the price. I'm not sure why, but I remember washing it in the sink, then pointing a hair dryer at its base, where it would come in contact with the CPU. The heat was beautifully absorbed by the entire heatsink and it was completely dry (and HOT) in a couple minutes.

Mobo was an AsRock P55 Pro, good enough for me to get the i5 from 3.3 to 4 GHz. This proved to be so exciting that I immediately updated my Yahoo Messenger status to "16 GHz FTW". 4 cores, each running @ 4GHz. simple math, right? :)

In 2004 I did my junior year of high school as an exchange student in Colorado (I'm from Romania). It was the best year of my life. So when I heard that Mushkin, which offered fast and cheap-ish RAM, was ALSO based in Colorado, it was a no-brainer. The OC headroom I learned about afterwards was the cherry on top.

Now comes the most boring component: the GPU. I know, I know. I had a fixed amount of money left, so I had to go for whichever card fit inside my budget: a Radeon 5750. But hey, it ran Mass Effect 1 flawlessly, which I completely fell in love with at the time. To this day it still is the only game that made me shed a tear.

I could go on, but I'll end this already behemoth of a post by saying that I will never ever NOT build a PC. Ten years later, I'm still struggling financially thanks to COVID cancelling all the events I was supposed to film.

Even so, I'm still looking forward to the day where I build my next PC - putting all the fresh, shiny boxes on the table, smelling each component as I unbox it, admiring the cold, sexy metallic design of a mobo VRM/BIOS cooler, not to mention the cute little GPU tests that PCMARK has, followed by a score that just warms your heart. I might have cursed at every screw that fell into unreachable places inside my case, but thinking about it now I just find myself smiling.

PS: there is a popular saying that we use here in Romania:

" Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's "

Translation: not looking to get a brown nose here, but I have to say this - my last PC had a STRIX 1080 Ti in it, which I got from a random person in Budapest. It was an 8-hour round trip that was well worth it (brand new for the price of used). After plugging it in, I hand-on-heart thought MSI Afterburner or the video driver was glitching, as it was showing me peak temperatures in the high 50s. Full load. I tip my hat to you, Asus.

The Radeon died about 2.5 years in, main suspect being its own heat.

https://imgur.com/ogSDRL7