Hobbies

PC Building

Ten-plus years of building PCs — gaming rigs, and the workstations that do the heavy lifting for my own research.

If you’re planning a build and want a second opinion on parts, feel free to reach out. Fair warning: as of mid-2026 it’s an unusually bad moment to build your PC. AI datacenter demand has pushed memory, SSDs, and GPUs to the point where a sensible build now costs about what an extravagant one did a year ago.

A white ASUS ROG case mid-build with its panels off, showing white cabling, a white AIO cooler and a white graphics card, a screwdriver lying on the desk beside it — An all-white ROG build, part-way through.

A black glass-paneled tower on a desk in daylight, lit strips glowing softly, next to a monitor and mouse — Daylight, and the case that finally matched the desk.

A dark tower photographed at night, its memory and graphics card lighting the inside of the case in blue and green — A performance beast, after dark.

Interior of a build showing routed cables, a radiator, memory sticks and a small display reporting a CPU temperature of 38 degrees — Where the actual work is: routing, airflow, and a thermal readout.

A small-form-factor black case on a desk, spare components and boxes on shelves behind it — Small-form-factor, which is a different puzzle entirely.

A desk at night lit almost entirely by the machine: violet light across the wall, a glowing keyboard, and the case beside a dark monitor — A room lit by a computer.