4. How much money did you spend on the rig as it is right now?
Apart from the various equipment for making the case (routers and saws), I approximate that the rig costs around 2.5K euro including the monitor.
5. How often do you update/buy a new rig?
I grew up in the 'dinosaur era' of Amiga 500 (one of which I owned), but my first real encounter with a computer (sort of), was an Oric 1 that my uncle lent me after he upgraded to the aforementioned Amiga himself.
I built my first real computer system in 1998 using the infamous Celeron 300A chip overclocked to 450MHz (it initially had only 8GB of storage and some couple MBs RAM, but worked fine for more than 8 years!). Later I owned various laptops during my years at the University, but again turned to system building in 2010, with the AMD-CPU Phenom II X4 965 BE and two Radeon HD 6850 GPUs. I currently have an i7 4790S + GTX 980ti combo that I built in 2014.
6. What components are used?
In this build I opted for the red team again, with their successful new Ryzen 3600 CPU and rx 5700xt GPU (PowerColor Red Dragon). Since the case I've manufactured is relatively small, I went for an ITX motherboard (Gigabyte Auorus X570 I PRO WiFi). I combined them with 2x8GB of RAM (Crucial Ballistix Elite 3600MHz CL16) and a 1TB SSD (Corsair Force MP600) as system disc. Storage wise I also included two 4TB HDD (Seagate Barracudas with 256MB cache), setup in RAID 1 (there should be plenty storage, and perhaps some extra security for the family photos ).
For PSU, I went with a 600W SFX unit (Corsair SF600 V2). To keep the interior cool (and quiet) I installed two Noctua NF-A20 200mm PWM case fans. One sucks in air from below, where I also mounted a removable dust filter from Demciflex, and the other pulls out hot air at the top.
To cool the CPU I used the nice NH-L9x65 SE-AM4 from Noctua. I also bought custom-sleeved cables from CableMod, because some of the cables that came with the PSU weren’t long enough for my special design. Finally, I mounted an anti-Vandal switch with red LED to celebrate AMDs great return.