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Introduction

Alright, the time has come for me to build my own gaming PC! This will be the very first PC I have ever built, but I can't wait. For the past 5 years, I have had 2 main computers I use: My 27" 2014 iMac and my 2013 15" MacBook Pro. My MacBook Pro is still my college workhorse computer and isn't going anywhere! My iMac however is starting to show its age. It still runs smoothly and is a great computer for browsing the web, watching videos and movies, photo editing, and light to moderate gaming. Indeed, it is now located in my room to be used as a media center as it is still fully functional and an all around great computer!

However, some of the internals are lacking to be sufficient for doing things like rendering in Blender, large amounts of video editing, gaming with high-end graphics, machine learning, and things of this nature. The iMac has a 3.5 GHz Intel Quad-Core i7 and an Nvidia GTX 780m GPU. Up until about a year or two ago, Nvidia supported the 780m for use in rendering using its Cuda cores. However, they dropped the support for that in the last year or so, and it made it so I was unable to harness that power for rendering and calculations. The GPU also struggles to play a lot of modern games, with even Skyrim not running super smoothly at full graphics. It is a great computer, and it most certainly isn't going anywhere! However, it is time for an upgrade to enable me to expand my work abilities and my gaming capabilities.

I had two options for how to proceed with getting a PC for gaming: Buy one pre-built with the specs I wanted, or build my own. I did initially price some systems that were similar in specs to what I desired, and actually a bit below what I truly wanted, but the inflation that is added for a pre-built system just made this proposition simply unacceptable. This combined with a couple of issues that influenced my choice as well. Firstly, a lot of pre-built systems cut some corners in terms of internals to save money, namely motherboard quality, RAM quantity, or SSD capacity (or worse, they mainly use just SATA HDDs instead...). There are companies that don't do this, one which I'll come back to being System76. However, without the "cut corners" the price skyrockets even more. The other issue is that almost all gaming setups come with Windows 10 installed. As the title of this post implies, I am not making a Windows gaming rig, which may sound odd too many as Windows is assumed to be the default platform for gaming. However, companies like Valve and Nvidia have done a lot of work to get compatibility for software and hardware to work with Linux, and gaming is certainly now exception. With Valve's Proton system, many Windows games can be played on Linux now, with many more games natively supporting it by default. This great compatibility for Linux, combined with my love for the system and my hatred for Windows meant that there was never a second option for what OS I would use. I'm a Mac guy anyways, so it's not like I really used Windows for anything else... This reason this is an issue for pre-built systems is that with Windows pre-loaded, it can be difficult to get it unloaded, requiring fiddling around in the BIOS to disable features designed to stop the installation of alternative OS's on the system.

There are a few companies that do offer Linux gaming setups, namely System76. They have great hardware that combines with their custom Linux distribution, PopOS, built on Ubuntu to offer a great and nearly seamless gaming experience on the platform. They actually offer systems with nearly exactly the same hardware I am using. However, the inflation for pre-built systems meant this wasn't an option, as a similar system to what I will be building would have been over $3800, which is way outside of my price range. However, if I needed a pre-built Linux system for gaming, machine learning, or advanced rendering or video processing, I would absolutely turn to System76 for my hardware needs.

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System Specs

Now, to the part I'm sure y'all have been waiting for! Here are the specs for the system I am building, including the prices* for each of the parts.
(*Note that these prices are what I paid to order through Amazon and may not be consistent across all retail platforms.)

Part	Description	Price
CPU	Intel i9-9900k	$530
GPU	ZOTAC Gaming GeForce RTX 2080 AMP Extreme	$800
Motherboard	Gigabyte Z390 AORUS Pro WiFi	$179
SSD	Blue 3D NAND 1TB	$160
Power Supply (PSU)	FOCUS+ 850 Gold	$130
RAM	Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB	$210
Case	Cooler Master	$120
Cooling	Noctua NH-U145	$65
Monitor	Asus 28" 4K	$300
Speakers	Osunlin Sound Bar	$34
Additional	Additional Plans & Warrenties	$146
Total		$2643

As you can see, with a total just over $2600 building a PC with these kind of specs is makes vastly more economic sense than buying one prebuilt. It allowed me to select the parts I wanted to ensure the proper level of quality, and I was even able to get an overclocked GPU, something not available in any pre-built options I could find.

Hopefully by this time tomorrow I will have the PC built and have it up and running! The processor will arrive tomorrow morning and I'll spend the afternoon building it. I'll be using System76's PopOS as my main, and hopefully only, OS for the system. If I find that Linux doesn't support the games/applications I want/need to run, then I may have to install Windows on a separate partition of the SSD. However, it certainly won't be my main OS and I hope I am not forced to do this at all.

I will post an update with how the building progress went hopefully tomorrow! After that, I will make one or two posts on my experience using Linux as my main OS on the system.

Here's to building my first PC! With me luck! :)

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Here is a link to part 2, where I describe how the build process went, how powerful the system is, and what my thoughts on it are! Definitely check it out if you enjoyed part 1 of this series!
Building a Linux Gaming PC - Part 2: Building, Results, and Benchmarks

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