used NZXT BLD. seems mostly fine but there is some little stuff like bad/incomplete installation of windows and audio and graphics drivers. tried to create recovery media for a fresh start but can't even use "reset this PC" for some reason. maybe i'm overlooking something. probably just going to have to go with a clean reinstall

had to tighten screws in some fans that were making noise. little worried about the GPU and the other fans. this is stuff that i'm very particular and paranoid about when i'm building PCs so it's a pretty annoying that this professional PC building company can't get it right. i'm going to try to hit all the screws when i move my SSDs from my previous build into the new one

the card is kind of wild. it's completely handling everything i throw at it at 1440p/120+ fps on max settings. mind you, i'm coming from a nearly 6 year old 980ti but i was still able to finagle 1440p/60 fps on almost every game on that card beause it was awesome and i got really good at optimizing graphics settings (usually just downscaling the resolution and rarely running above medium shadow settings.) now it appears that i can just max everything out all the time. this must be what it feels like to shop online and finally be able to choose "sort by highest price" 😎