The holidays are all about giving, and recently I had the absolute honor of building an awesome
gaming PC and surprising someone who could really use it. While I always have fun building for
myself, building a PC for someone else was a whole other level of excitement. So come along
with me while I step through the build using parts donated by a fan, talk about how this whole thing
came together with the help of a 501c3 charity, and of course show the reaction of the recipient!
So this whole thing kicked off months ago when a fan of PCWorld and The Full Nerd reached out to
anonymously donate parts for a build that would go to someone in need.
This was a super awesome act of kindness, one I am very thankful for, so I wanted to
make sure I did it right. Now of course it took a bit of time to secure all the parts,
but once the use-case and theme was locked down we were off to the races.
For the theme, the donor wanted to go with a sleek all monochrome build that focuses on
high refresh rate 1440p gaming, but could easily do some streaming work if needed.
At the heart of the build is the ever popular AMD Ryzen 7 5800X with a white lid!
Just kidding, this is just a standard 5800X. And when it comes to white GPUs
this Gigabyte Vision RTX 3070 packs plenty of 1440p power while looking super sleek.
Speaking of Gigabyte Vision, that also happens to be the motherboard in this rig,
and boy does this B550 board look fabulous in this setup. To round it out we also
have a pair of white RAM sticks totaling 32GBs, a white 360mm AIO liquid cooler,
and four white RGB case fans - for more frames of course. For storage we have two M.2 NVMe drives,
one of which was graciously sent over by Crucial, for a total of 3TBs of solid state storage,
paired with a 4TB hard drive. All of this lives inside the all-white Be Quiet Silent Base 802,
which should keep all these parts quiet and cool, along with plenty of room for upgrading.
Aside from the PC itself, we also have literally everything else needed for a gaming setup,
including a monitor, mouse, keyboard and more. I was also able to secure
some awesome hardware from Creative, because you know audio is important to me, so thanks
to them as well. For a full parts list check out the PCPartPicker list in the description.
Rather than speeding through a live build of this machine I took my time,
did it right, and really put my best foot forward to make sure it looked nice. Let’s check it out!
I'm really proud of this build right here. There isn’t anything like building something
for someone else, and it really was so much fun thinking of the surprise that awaits.
But how did I find someone in need to give this to?
Well that’s where I enlisted the help from friend of the show Travis Peacock from Shellback Tech.
Shellback Tech is a 501c3 charity that builds and donates one-of-a-kind custom
gaming and streaming PCs to disabled veterans and disabled first responders.
Their mission is to provide disabled individuals the outlet they need to combat the many stresses
that come with their disabilities and aid in their overall mental health - a very worthwhile cause!
As an Air Force brat myself, helping out disabled veterans is near and dear to my heart,
and it was an absolute pleasure teaming up with Travis.
So who is the veteran we surprised? Well his name is Sam Burt, and he
actually served in the Navy with Travis! This is what Travis had to say about Sam.
So for the reveal, Travis and I set up a Zoom call with Sam,
pretending we were interviewing him about Shellback Tech.
He had no idea the PC behind me during the call was his, let’s see how it played out:
I had such a fun time meeting Sam, working with Travis, and building a sweet ass PC. I’m so
excited to hear about Sam’s newest adventures in PC gaming and I’m looking forward to working with
Travis and Shellback Tech again in the future. And one more big thank you to the anonymous donor who
kicked all this off, we couldn’t have done this without you. And of course thanks to Crucial and
Creative for throwing in some gear for this special build. Thanks for watching, have a
great holiday, and be sure to subscribe here on PCWorld for more hardware and software goodness!