4. How much money did you spend on the rig as it is right now?

This is actually quite hard, to sum up as the rig is sort of in its 3rd incarnation from when I started it. It originally started out in a Thermaltake Core X9 using a 4790k, Asus RoG Ranger 7 Z97, 32gb Hyper X DDR3, and 2x 970 GTX in SLI. The rig was cooled using dual loops. This is where most of the water cooling parts were introduced along with the PSU and m.2 SSD. After over a year of running that rig, it’s sheer size was causing issues as my PC is situated in our living room. It’s size limited us to what desks we could buy, so I decided to migrate it into the then newly released INWIN 303 which required me to drop down to a single water loop, at the same time I had already upgraded to a 1440P Gsync panel, which could expose the relatively small vram onboard the 970’s so I also added the 1080GTX. Around 6 months later came the Ryzen Refresh which is where the build is at now – standing me around £1650 for hardware, around £430 for watercoooling parts and a further £700 ish on peripherals so £2750 excluding the actual modding parts.

5. How often do you update/buy a new rig?

I upgrade around every 18 months, although that may change now as I usually go mid-tier, this time opting for the 1080. A whole build is done approx. 5 yearly, but that’s kinda hard to say as I have had 4 cases in 6 years.

6. What components are used?