High-Performance Builds / Completed
Flagship Gaming Rig
A custom water-cooled tower built for high-refresh RPG rendering and heavy local workloads — spec'd part by part, tuned and benchmarked.
This is the machine that carries everything: long RPG sessions at high refresh, local model experiments, video encoding and a stack of containers that never quite gets smaller.
The brief was simple — sustained performance under load, not headline benchmark numbers. That meant designing around thermals and airflow first and choosing components second.
Design before parts
The build started as a thermal plan, not a parts list. Radiator placement, intake pressure and cable routing were decided before a single component was ordered.
- Positive pressure intake to keep dust out of the loop.
- Radiators split front and top so neither exhausts into the other.
- GPU undervolted for a better performance-per-watt curve than stock.
Tuning and validation
Every change was benchmarked before and after. Undervolting the GPU cost about two percent of peak frame rate and returned around fifteen percent lower package temperature — a trade worth making for four-hour sessions.
Memory tuning gave the biggest real-world gain: frame-time consistency improved more than average FPS did, which is what you actually feel in play.
Specification
- CPU
- AMD Ryzen 9 — 16 cores / 32 threads
- GPU
- NVIDIA RTX class, triple-fan, undervolted
- Memory
- 64 GB DDR5, EXPO tuned
- Storage
- 2 TB NVMe Gen4 boot + 4 TB NVMe scratch
- Cooling
- Custom loop — CPU + GPU block, 360 mm + 280 mm radiators
- Power
- 1000 W 80+ Gold, fully modular
- Case
- Airflow-first mid tower, filtered intake
- Peak load temps
- CPU 71 °C / GPU 63 °C sustained
Tags
- Custom Build
- Water Cooling
- Overclocking
- Benchmarking
Technology
- AMD Ryzen
- NVIDIA RTX
- DDR5
- NVMe
- Windows 11
- Custom Loop
Related notes
More High-Performance Builds
Home Compute Cluster
A small self-hosted cluster running containers, data jobs and lab services — the personal 'supercomputer' behind the experiments.
Dual-Purpose Workstation
The daily driver: analytics and marketing work by day, campaigns and creative writing by night — one desk, two very different workloads.
Talk shop?
Parts lists, thermals, benchmarks or campaign notes — I'm always happy to compare builds.