@jnjnilson6 GREAT THREAD idea!
For me to pick a "favorite" would be really hard as I have enjoyed so many of my builds. Most of them were completely unnecessary and/or the result of me just wanting to tinker and tune. I cannot recall all of the details of many of them any more, but will share a few highlights from over the years.
My current rigs are:
Gaming/surfing is an i9 11900K on a Z590i Unify with 32GB of GSkill Trident 3200/16 running an RTX3070.
HTPC is an i5 11600K which was in the previous position until an outstanding deal on the i9 presented. 16GB of Corsair 3000/16 with a GTX1080. This one has the absolutely cheapest B series mobo I could find on Amazon and is doing an outstanding job.
The gaming rig is all SSD storage w/ NVME as OS drive. The HTPC is actually running an M.2 SATA SSD as OS drive with a supplemental SSD for game storage along with a (blech) WD Green 3TB HDD for backups. I also keep a Synology NAS for critical storage and backup, large files, etc.
Honorable mentions over the years.
I had been the self-imposed victim of cheapo Black Friday specials for years. Running Celeron/Athlon low end CPU on dedicated graphics and so forth. I finally decided I wanted to actually game on a PC, off console, so the first "real" capable gaming PC I ever purchased was a Dell XPS 8000 series with the i7 2600 and some 6000 series GPU. It was a really decent machine, particularly in relation to what I had been using before and got really good service out of it over the years. The single reason I finally got rid of it was due to being BIOS locked to the three GPU it was offered with from Dell. As time went on, none of those cards were strong enough to continue playing the games I wanted. Most of my "upgrade" experience (outside of playing PC Lego) was due to a title not being able to play on the current.
I had an i5 4690 machine alongside a 960 that was a great machine for me. I actually passed that one down to my son with a 970 in it and still works fine today.
I cannot comment on a thread like this without also mentioning Ryzen. When 1xxx was released, I purchased an R3 1200 on the day of release. I was enthralled and it made a great upgrade to the above i5 PC, I think in part to just how much newer it was. That machine saw many updates over the next few years first moving to a 1700 and then a 2700X which I just recently sold. The 1200 was purchased by a friend of mine and the 1700 based machine is being utilized as an office machine. The 2700X was the first machine that I picked and purchased a case that was not the cheapest one available. It was also my first foray into AIO cooling as well as M.2 NVME storage.
Nice.
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