The Black Pearl
First time I’ve built anything in 20 years, and boy, a lot has changed since the last time I built a PC!
I bought a Dell 16 Plus laptop in April of 2025 for college coursework. Core Ultra 9 288V, 32G ram, 2TB SSD, but unfortunately with integrated Arc graphics. This thing was way overkill for a college laptop, but I wanted to ensure I wouldn’t need to upgrade again anytime soon.
I found myself looking for a new game to play and discovered PoE, and realized I could run it on the laptop! Abysmal frame rates, and it ran hotter than hell, but it was playable. I found myself gaming on my laptop far more than I was on my Xbox Series X.
In December of 2025, I picked up an HP Omen 35L from Best Buy for $1200 on sale. It had a Ryzen 8700F and a 5070, with 32G of DDR5-6000 Kingston Fury Beast RGB. With everything rising in price, I thought it was a pretty good deal. PoE was certainly much faster on this machine than on the laptop!
With the release of Crimson Desert, the Omen was struggling. I could play at ~100 FPS, but I got some pretty severe drops and tearing at fairly high graphics settings.
Sometime in June of 2026, I listed my Halo Infinite edition Xbox Series X on the marketplace for $750, which is about $300 cheaper than comps have sold for on eBay. A guy hit me up and asked if I’d trade for a 5070 Ti. I asked a buddy of mine at work if he thought it was worth it and whether he thought I could sell my 5070 for $500; he told me he’d give me $500 for it, so I made the deal.
Threw the 5070 Ti in the Omen, and I was able to get better frame rates and more stability, but the CPU was obviously bottlenecking it at this point, and the card started running warm (76°-80°C), as did the 8700F (84°C was the hottest temp recorded.
I started searching for new case fans and came across Arctic’s new case and Corsair’s Air 5400. Initially, I planned to move the whole MoBo from the Omen into a new case, but I quickly realized that, between the proprietary PSU and non-standard pins on the HP Wolant board, I’d be better off with a new board. If I’m getting a new board, I may as well upgrade the CPU, right? Well, I'd better liquid cool it, too. Cue spiral.
Anyways, TLDR-I’ve spent way too much money to get to this point.
I named this one The Black Pearl. Since it's a primarily Corsair build, and a corsair was a privateer ship, I felt that naming it after the fictional fastest pirate ship was appropriate!
Case: Corsair Air 5400
PSU: Corsair RM1000x
MoBo: Asus ROG Crosshair Hero BTF X870E
CPU: 9800X3D
GPU: PNY 5070 Ti (Custom fan shroud printed, waiting for hardware to arrive)
RAM: Kingston Fury Beast 6000/CL40 (will be ordering some Shugo ASAP)
AIO: Corsair Titan RX360 LCD
Fans: Corsair - (3) LX120 & (3) LX120-R - Fan curves in screenshots.