When Annie came to me and said that she will need a desktop computer this fall for school, since it is being delivered remotely, I jumped at the opportunity to build a new machine for myself and pass on my current machine to Annie.

Don’t get me wrong, the current computer, Athena, has nothing wrong with it. It has continued to serve my needs well and I have no complaints. I’ve been wanting to upgrade the processor for a while now, but beyond that I was incredibly happy with my machine… But new and shiny!

I picked out the following components for the new build:

• AMD Ryzen 3600 Processor
• ASUS TUF GAMING X570-PLUS Motherboard
• Kingston HyperX Fury 32GB DDR4 3000MHz CL15 RAM
• GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Video Card
• Crucial P1 1TB NVMe Boot Drive
• Crucial MX500 1TB SSD Storage Drive
• Corsair RM650x 80 Plus Gold Power Supply
• Fractal Design Meshify C TG Case
• LG 27GL650F-B 27″ 144Hz Primary Monitor

The motherboard supports the latest connection standard for M.2 drives, meaning that the Crucial P1 that I purchased has a maximum sequential read speed of almost 2 GB per second and a write speed of almost 1.5 GB per second, or around four times that of my SSD and close to ten times that of most standard spinning rust hard drives.

My current secondary monitor, an ASUS in portrait mode, will be moving over to my new computer, as will all my peripherals. It should be a great work computer for years to come, though I’ll definitely need more hard drive storage at some point. Maybe once multi-terabyte SSD drives get cheaper.

I hope that Annie will be happy with Athena for school this fall and that it serves her well and I hope that Freyr will be the workhorse that I need it to be.