Current build showcase: what are people running in October 2026?

[Layla79]

Annual check-in on what people are actually building or running. Not aspirational builds, actual hardware. What is your current main machine, what was the build goal, and if you built it yourself what would you do differently.

Intel, AMD, Nvidia, whatever: this is not a team sports thread. Just specs and experience.

[Aaron]

Ryzen 9 7950X, 64GB DDR5, RTX 5080. Built it for 3D work and video editing late last year. The CPU performance is excellent. The GPU was a significant investment but it pays for itself in render times. Cooling was the part I got wrong first time round.

[Patrick94]

Intel Core Ultra 9, 32GB DDR5, RTX 4070 Ti. Mid-range gaming build from about 18 months ago. Still performs well for everything I throw at it. The thing I would change is getting more storage from the start rather than adding it later.

[Hollow Ronan]

A small form factor build I put together specifically to fit in a flat where space is the constraint. AMD 7600X, 32GB, RX 7700 XT. Thermals were the challenge and I spent more time on case selection and airflow than anything else.

[CMPunk96]

Still on a build from four years ago that I have kept relevant through GPU and storage upgrades. Not the most efficient approach economically but I like the machine and replacing everything felt like waste.

[HighKey15]

NAS build primarily: old Ryzen 5 system repurposed, 4 drive bays, running unRAID. The main PC build is separate. Once you have a proper NAS the question of how you managed without one becomes unanswerable.

[Molly_62]

The Geekom A9 Max mini PC mentioned in some tech press recently caught my eye. Anyone here have experience with mini PCs versus full builds? The performance gap has narrowed significantly.

[CosmicRay65]

Building a machine specifically for AI local inference work. The VRAM question is the whole build decision: 24GB GPU minimum for the models I want to run locally, which narrows choices and pushes cost up.