Builds & Upgrades - Karmi's Musings & Tech

A lot has happened since Part 1 on 5/29/23 — mainly, the Intel® Core™ i9-13900K CPU started dropping in price ‘n then dropped again. After I saw the first big drop in price, I purchased it at $509.99, and a day later it dropped again to $499.99.

I don’t ever recall Intel dropping their price for their top Intel® Core™ i9 Processors this much–this early, e.g., best price for an i9-12900K right now is $402.27. It must be a good time to Build and/or Upgrade a desktop computer — the ASUS Dual NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti OC Edition I had just purchased for $364.00 (which was a bargain) is now at $319.99 from B&H.

‘To Make a Long Story Short‘ — after buying the CPU, I decided to go ahead ‘n purchase all the needed components to build a new computer inside the Apevia case (no longer available & mine doesn’t have all those LIGHTS!). I’ll get into the new components in Part 3 of this series.

I’ve been building my own desktop computers since 2004, and have gotten better at it over the years. Currently have a main PC – ‘Apevia‘ and two main Test/Secondary PCs – ‘Rose‘ & Frankenstein (AKA – ‘Frank‘). Their parts are listed at – Buy Low or BYOC – ‘Build Your Own Computer’.

Two more PCs are sitting in a shed – listed as not needed or retired, and a homemade Test Bench. 🙂 Parts can build up over time, e.g., a few years ago I finally threw away a gallon ziplock baggie full of old desktop memory. Now I try to better manage memory in new builds and/or upgrades, but eventually even that memory will become too old to use in a modern PC.

For about 7 years now, I have been using a case I like to build a new computer in – this time it’s a Apevia X-Qpack3-NW-BK, taking the MoBo from that case (left pretty much intact), and moving it to another case as an upgrade. Switching memory and other components around, upgrading an older case #2, and then building a ‘New‘ computer in case #1 from there.

Builds & Upgrades — Part 2 (‘Rose’ has Plastic Surgery)

Computer Builds & Upgrades – Part 1