First ever build!

tomnips · August 9, 2016

So my Lenovo laptop was dying, with boot times anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour. When the inevitable happened and it wouldn't turn on at all I decided I would attempt my first pc build. I have no previous experience but spent what I thought to be sufficient time researching and reading/watching tutorials (discovering LTT came after the build!). I used pc part picker to gather a list of parts which where:

AMD FX9590

Arctic Freezer 7 Pro

ASRock 990FX Extreme 9 ATX

4x Crucial Ballistix Tactical 8gb DDR3

MSI Radeon R9 390

EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 80+ Platinum

Aerocool Strike-X Xtreme Mid Tower

Samsung 850 Evo-series 250GB SSD

Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD

So, at the time I was aware of some poor choices:

The power supply is much more powerful than I need, however I wanted to make it future proof. I now know this is probably more powerful than I will ever need but at least I won't be down on power!

Did I say choices? That's about the only thing I thought was awry but since putting it all together and loving it I have become ever increasingly interested in building rather than just using! So, I now also know:

The AMD FX9590 is not that good for gaming.

The Arctic Freezer 7 Pro was not nearly enough to cool the CPU adequately.

I have already addressed the cooling and switched out the cooler for a Corsair H80i V2 with massive improvements.

A couple of pictures are below before and after the cooler swap. So, I want some input please! This is my 1st build. I want to learn. Let me know all about my stupid decisions and what I should do better in future.

Pre cooler swap

After cooler swap

What I think to be some semi-reasonable cable management