My Late 2018 Red + White Gaming PC Build
28 Jan 2019I finished this build in December, just didn’t get around to posting it online until now. The aesthetic took some work. My form factor and the color scheme constraints were not easy to build in.
Background
I first built a PC in early 2015, which still ran just fine, and played most of my games at 1440p, high settings. But I remember the process of building a PC to be really fun, and I wanted to go through it again. So I decided to sell the previous build for parts and build a whole new PC from scratch (only reusing storage from the previous build).
I was a lot more patient with the research, part selection and shipping times this time around because I already had a working gaming PC. I wanted to go with a distinct color scheme. I like the white plus color builds I see from time to time on Reddit, and figured I’d go with white and red to match some of the furniture in my living room. Compact form factor was a must, because I can’t imagine having a PC in my home that’s larger than the micro-ATX form factor.
The Build
Specs
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600X 3.6GHz 6-Core Processor
- Motherboard: MSI B450M Mortar Titanium Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (Red)
- Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 500GB SSD, Seagate 1TB 7200RPM SSHD
- Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 8GB GAMING OC Video Card
- Case: Corsair Crystal 280X RGB MicroATX Mid Tower Case
- Power Supply: Corsair RM750x Fully-Modular Power Supply
- Additional: Corsair LL120 RGB 120mm Fan (x2), CableMod ModMesh PSU Cables with Pro upgrade (custom lengths, colors; 24-pin ATX, CPU, 8+6-pin bridged PCI-e)
Gigabyte deserves a shoutout for being the only Nvidia partner to release RTX GPUs with white coolers at launch. I hope I see a day when more PC part brands have white variants of their parts (or better yet, red and white).
Hard Mode Color Scheme
Turns out it’s very easy to find parts for black and red builds, which I despise (sorry). White and red, not very much. There are barely any cases or motherboards that come with that color scheme out of the box, especially in the micro-ATX size.
I planned the build as a mostly-white-some-black build, with hopefully enough red accents that I’d be able to call it a white and red PC. My trick was to buy custom PSU cables, red RAM sticks, and hope that the black CPU cooler won’t be an eyesore (it wasn’t!).
It wasn’t easy trying to gauge what the end product would look like without any parts in hand, so I spaced out my purchases a bit, bought the case first, and measured out PSU cable lengths in it.
After some deliberation, I decided on CableMod’s ModMesh with Pro upgrades. I’m very glad I did, because the colors are super vibrant and they’re absolutely beautiful cables overall. As a bonus, the included cable combs mean they basically come pre-managed, eliminating the need to straighten them out later. Their ModFlex cables are not advertised to have the same vibrant colors, and don’t even come in the same bright red color that I used for some of my sleeving, as I learned later.
The PSU Hiccup
There was a small complication related to the 550W PSU I bought not having enough sockets for my custom cables (details in this Reddit post), which required me to swap for an unnecessarily higher wattage version and wait for it to ship. Other than that, the build went smoothly and the PC turned on the first time!
Links
- My r/buildapc post with a few more glam shots of the build.
- My r/nvidia post with some glam shots of the GPU, because I didn’t see enough images of the white Gigabyte RTX cards online at the time.
- My advisory on the CableMod + Corsair RM550x + RTX 2070 incompatibility issue.
