PC Build Portfolio: Violet

Jennifer needed a computer. Well, she actually just needed a better computer than her laptop for working from home. The problem we were running into revolved around her laptop’s wireless/LAN connection, and after testing the connection through our wireless extender, we decided that it’d probably be easiest to build a PC for her and just include a motherboard with WiFi built-in, or add a PCIe WiFi card.

Of course, as it turns out it was rather cheap to just have someone come out to the house to wire Ethernet connections to other rooms in the house, which kinda negated any benefit gain from building the computer, but Jennifer seems to actually love her computer now, which she’s taken to calling Violet.

Purpose

Jennifer isn’t really a PC gamer; she prefers her Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and the PS4. As she’s explained to me on a few occasions, she just never got used to playing games using a mouse and keyboard… No judgments here. The purpose of this PC isn’t purely gaming for this reason.

She needed this first and foremost for work, but this was a build that I wanted to look swanky, as well as perform to Jennifer’s needs. To that end, it’s a dream machine for her. Not only does it make her proud to own, but she also loves the performance for the tasks she’s using it for at the moment. With games like Baldur’s Gate III on the way however, I felt that she needed something that would knock it out of the park.

Decision Making Process

Violet was assembled with aesthetics and the future in mind. Jennifer wanted a white and purple PC, so when I saw the Gigabyte Z490 Vision G motherboard after she picked out the white Fractal Design Meshify C case, I knew I had to make that happen. Aesthetics did play a role in making the system slightly more expensive than necessary though, as the motherboard I chose didn’t have build-in WiFi, which was a necessity at the time, as we didn’t have the room she wanted to work in wired with an Ethernet connection; hence the WiFi adapter card.

As for going Intel over Ryzen, Jennifer didn’t need a graphics card at the time, as she wouldn’t be using the system to play games at the moment. So the choice needed to be made:

1. Buy a GPU she wouldn’t need, either getting something cheap that would need to be replaced later, or something powerful she wouldn’t be utilizing for a while.
2. Buy a Ryzen 3200G/3400G CPU, which would be cheap, but also not meet the performance I would want her to have available when she decided to play games.
3. Buy Intel, which often come with serviceable integrated GPUs.

As you can see, I went with the final option. One of the added benefits to this is that I could give her my RTX 2060 when I upgraded later this year, and I could save a little money up front by not shelling out for something comparable. Additionally, the i5-10600K has impressive performance, trading blows in gaming with the i7-10700K that’s suppose to be an upgrade, while still offering an iGPU that would allow her to work. Furthermore, the iGPU could come in handy later if she decided to make use of programs like Adobe Premiere.

The choice of SSD and HDD combination was a no-brainer for the price, and since PCIe Gen 4 NVMe SSDs are both horrifically expensive and nearly pointless outside of productivity uses, that further cemented the choice to go with Intel for her system.

As for cooling and power supply, I always like to go a little above and beyond if necessary. Since I plan on overclocking the CPU, and I wanted to ensure her system was as quiet as possible, a closed loop liquid cooler was the way to go. The result is that the PC is basically silent when it’s on. Likewise, the PSU is more than she needs right now, but I wanted to leave her with something that left room for upgrades, and sat comfortably on the efficiency curve.

Specifications

CPU: Intel Core i5-10600K
CPU Cooler: Fractal Design Celsius+ S28 Prisma
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z490 VISION G
Memory: Crucial Ballistix RGB 3600MHz 16 GB (2 x 8 GB)
Storage: Western Digital Blue SN550 1 TB NVME SSD
Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5″ 7200RPM HDD
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 6 GB XC ULTRA GAMING
Case: Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA GA 750 W 80+ Gold Certified (Fully Modular)
Other: TP-Link Archer TX50E PCIe WiFi Adapter

Glamour Shots

Feedback

What are your thoughts on this build? How does Violet look on paper? Does it live up to the name? Let me know what you think!