It turned out not so easy tast. Yet, for some reason, I felt more excited spending time researching parts and putting the build together with my own two hands than being able to run almost everything so smoothly, which was kind of the point of buying a PC.
That's very common! What have you built and what problems did you run into?
Despite being excited about building the PC in my first post, about 6 weeks later I disassembled it as the airflow direction wasn't compatible with its location and even with a better cooler it was sitting at a crazy 60 degrees at idle. I was going to move some stuff about but ended up breaking something on the mobo so abandoned the whole thing. It was a fun project to plan and build though, and stuff like cases and power supplies can always be used for something new down the line (which is why it's a good idea to buy good and not cheap ones).
We've actually been decommissioning a few bits at work recently so my list of computers to tinker with grows ever longer, despite the non-completion of this box and throwing out a 10 year old HP prebuilt earlier in the year:
Custom gaming PC: i7-7700K, GTX 1070. Really showing its age now, I think I'll be building a new gaming rig towards the end of 2021 but I've got a house move/relocation to plan first.
2 x Custom HTPC: both i7-7700, 1 with a GTX 1050ti, the other with GTX 970 (bits from previous gaming PCs that got paired with lower powered CPUs and ITX cases to make capable little boxes).
HP Microserver: AMD X3421, GTX 1050 (upped the RAM to 16GB, put in the GPU and fitted a server-grade SSD into the DVD slot to keep the drive bays clear for storage)
Apple 2010 Mac Pro: Xeon X5675, GTX 1050 (the low profile 1050 from the first post! It's a big improvement over the Radeon HD5770 that came as standard but looks absolutely comical inside the cavernous interior of the Mac Pro. It's a decommissioned server so despite only having the single CPU tray it is packing 32GB of registered DIMMs. I don't really know what to do with this as it's worse than all my other desktops but an absolute power hog)
Apple 2012 iMac 21": i7-3770S, GT 640M (adopted work project to invesigate whether drive could be swapped to SSD. Also increased RAM and switched CPU whilst inside. Got it just before the lockdown and proved to be vital as it was my only machine with a webcam for all the sudden Zooms etc)
Apple 2012 Macbook Pro 15": i7-3715QM, GTX 650M (I can't say that I'd bother snapping up an 8 year old plastic Dell laptop but this this is solid as a rock and remains a decent performer. Switched to a good SSD and will bring the RAM up from 4GB to 16 once the festive spending is over)
Stone N120: Celeron 1037U (the runt of the collection with an 11" screen, this cheap bit of junk is my travel laptop that I can afford to lose. I've switched to an SSD and filled its single SODIMM slot with an 8GB stick but that's all I can do. I don't really like laptops due to their lack of tinkerability)