With the wife about to spawn our first child, I figured this will be my last chance to buy a toy for myself for a while.

The new box is primarily for gaming with virtual reality as a focus, but I also needed photo editing capability (and therefore a monitor able to perform both good colour reproduction AND reasonable gaming). Virtual machines are used infrequently for work purposes, so high RAM requirements. Although not especially portable, I wanted it to be able to be dragged around for VR demos - hence the wireless card. An older HDD migrated over for good measure.

When first built, I had the NZXT Kraken X61 CPU cooler installed - but I got one with a dud pump and a ridiculous amount of gurgling/grinding (despite what their support suggested to fix it). This was promptly returned and as there were no direct replacements in stock, I went for the Corsair option as a replacement. The fans are very mildly noisier - but the pump is silent in comparison at least.

I also had a lot of random crashes with power faults in the logs for no apparent reason. After a bit of diagnostics, I narrowed the cause down to the keyboard. I had it plugged in the BIOS keyboard USB 2.0 ports to begin with, but am guessing that it was drawing too much power (stupid amounts of lights on this thing). Now it has been relegated to the USB 3.0 ports and has been golden since.

Mild overclocking to 4.4Ghz.

All now working flawlessly and the rift has been keeping me entertained =)