How I moved from barely usable laptop to custom made PC

During my first years at university, I used an old Lenovo Thinkpad 420. It’s a good laptop for office work but can barely run anything more demanding like virtualisation or gaming.

To make it more usable I’ve connected an external GPU (GTX 1050Ti) to it with some shady eGPU adapter:

The laptop would crash from time to time, but was able to run anything that required GPU. However, that didn’t help with the lack of RAM and CPU power.

new PC

After some saving, part by part I build my PC. Building it on my own allowed me to save some money and learn a bit more about hardware.

Specs:

• GTX 1050Ti. Later upgraded to RTX 3060Ti
• 32GB (4 * 8GB) of Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 3200MHz
• Corsair Hydro Series H100i PRO
• Intel i5 9600k
• Asus PRIME Z390-A motherboard
• 500W PSU from Corsair