With December quickly coming to a close, I am now looking forward to 2022. Sadly, the Steamdeck was delayed into Q1 2022 but the hunger for PC Gaming continues. My current “steambox” that I’ve talked about a long time ago continues to run albeit in a limited capacity. The Intel i3 3220, a budget processor when I got it back in 2013 still works but in the gaming sense is struggling. The original 8gb of ram had been upgraded to 16gb with the thought it would extend the life of the system which it has valiantly done. The graphics card in the system has been upgraded twice with hand-me-down cards from co-workers. Starting out as a XFX Radeon HD 6670, upgraded to an ASUS Radeon HD 5850 Top DirectCU. Then upgraded again to a Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870. The 7870 had recently failed resulting in a downgrade back to the 5850. I knew there wasn’t going to be much life left in this 2013 budget build and 2022 is going to be the year of PC gaming.

Research was done to build a competent gaming PC but within a price range I would be comfortable with. For PC gaming, my target is 1440p resolution and this made the Nvidia 3070 the graphics card that caught my eye. Now, trying to find a card with the current market and limited supply. I have a knack for finding items that are in limited supply but trying to find a graphics card which come in so many different variations is tough. After a few weeks of observing things, I came to the realization that putting together a PC myself was doable but the time commitment to be able to watch for the parts I need not feasible. So I instead turned to pre-builts.

Looking at pre-built PCs I wanted to ensure that I was buying something that was working now and could be upgraded into the future. I didn’t want to completely overpay for something just to get the graphics card either. I checked around at a number of sites like ibuypower, cyberpower, and newegg. It seemed like even with pre-builts I wasn’t guaranteed to see something right away either. I would have to watch a bit and the pounce when the right deal came along.

This brings me to Newegg on boxing day. I found myself looking at an ABS Gladiator with an Intel i7 11700KF, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 (brand to be determined during build), ASUS TUF Gaming Z590 Plus WIFI motherboard, G.Skill Trident RGB 16gb DDR4 3200 RAM, 1TB Intel M.2 NVMe, 750W 80 plus gold PSU. The specs should be good for PC gaming today and into the future. I could have opted for the non-K variant of the processor and a 3060 Ti graphics card but for the minor price difference I felt it was worth it. Now, I just have to wait for the shipment to arrive.