How My Setup Has Developed
By Zachary Crawford
Because we haven’t gone over hardware for a while in the tech section, I thought today I would share my work/gaming setup with all the Witherly Heights readers. In this article, I’m going to go over the parts that I have in my PC and how my setup has developed over time, and what upgrades I might be able to install into my PC to make it more up to date.
A few years ago, my friends and I became very interested in gaming and we all wanted to get new computers. At first, I got myself an omen gaming laptop so I could bring it to school to work but also be able to play games at home. At that point, I had a monitor, keyboard, and computer without much else to my setup. The laptop I had was moderately powerful and had Nvidia gtx 1060 graphics, an intel i7-8750H CPU, and 16GB of ram. Overall, this was likely the poorest choice I have made when it comes to purchasing electronics as this laptop broke fairly quickly and was very loud due to poor fan quality. At that point, my setup looked like this:
After my Omen gaming laptop broke, I decided it was time for me to build a computer that would last me a long time and was powerful enough to run all of the peripherals that I was going to use with it. So, I did some research and decided to build the computer that I still use today. At this point, I had the same keyboard, mouse, and headset as I did before but only had a 60hz monitor. I had just recently gotten a blue yeti mic and was using duct tape to keep my broken razer headphones together. (don’t buy most razer products… they kinda suck) At that point, my setup looked like this:
Since the photo above, I have gotten new headphones and a new mouse after they both broke. I also got a great 165hz monitor and moved some stuff around (always best to buy tech gear at a discount on Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime day, etc.). After all of these changes, this is what my setup looks like today:
When it comes to the PC that I have now, I only have a few comments on my past choices. I’m overall super happy with my choices in parts. While I think it may have been a better choice to upgrade my CPU to an i9, everything else in my PC is still working well to this day. While looking at the parts list of my new PC, it might be weird to see the high price tags on my GPU and case. But, when I bought these, they cost far less. Though I can’t remember now how much I spent on each, the case is now worth easily 2 times more than what I bought it for and the GPU price is $800+ over what I paid for it about two years ago. So, through my journey of crafting my setup, I learned mainly that building a PC early while keeping upgrade possibilities in mind is the best thing you can do. Also, make sure to do a LOT of research on things you are going to buy because you want them to last a long time. If you want to see all the parts that I used for the build, you can click here to see a full list that includes my build and peripherals.