I built this computer for my wife for her birthday. She's been wanting a gaming pc ever since I built mine late last year.

I had originally planned to build with the 8600k and the Z370-E board but this motherboard has dropped off the face of the earth so I decided to run 9th gen and take a look at ASUS's new offerings. These new boards are really nice. The all black design makes it fit into any design easily. The included VRM fan was a nice bonus and the new integrated IO shield is an improvement over the 8th gen integrated shield. The m.2 heatsink uses the same screw and standoff as the m.2 drive and it was a little difficult to align all three to screw down the heatsink and make sure the drive was snug. Another issue with the m.2 drive and this board was the ‘auto’ recognition feature between NVME and SATA. Out of the box this board would not recognize the m.2 drive and I had to manually set the condition to SATA before it would read the drive. Since there have been no issues and the MX500 seems to be a rock-solid drive delivering fast performance. The 9600k seems more than capable of handling itself and overclocks easily to 4.6 on all cores. I didn’t really want to push the system as it’s not mine and I wanted reliable performance with minimal heat/noise increase. The Dark Rock 4 cooler seems to be handling the heat generated just fine with temps under load peaking to 68°C.

The Vengeance Pro ram looks really nice. Clock really easily with the XMP profile to their specified 3200mhz. The only downside is that they’re not compatible with aura sync but the corsair software is easy to use and once you set it there’s no need to mess with it again.

The PRIME Ultra Gold PSU is fantastic. The build quality is top notch and the packaging is great. The 12-year warranty is great peace of mind. It’s the perfect fit for this build.

The be quiet! SilentWings 3 fans are so quiet. It’s unbelievable how silent the rig is even under load. It makes me want to switch out the fans in my machine. I can see the different in build quality and performance when you make the jump to $25+ fans.

The PG248QR is a great 1080p 144hz refresh rate monitor. I got it on sale at microcenter and after a little color tweaking it looks great. A nice budget friendly high refresh rate monitor.

I didn't get to take a lot of build pictures, I was trying to hurry and finish before she got home from work