Here’s how I won an $1,800 gaming PC (without a giveaway)

I’ve never had great luck with giveaways or sweepstakes, and frankly, I stopped participating in them years ago. On a fateful day in June 2022, however, I decided to enter an online PC building contest organized by WD and Nvidia. Like always, I didn’t really believe I’d win something, but a few weeks later, it became a reality. My tale is 2 years old, but better late than never as they say.

The stakes were that three winners would win the PCs they configured in the competition, and the first place winner was allowed to pick $1800 worth of components of their choice. From mulling an upgrade from my GTX 1660 Ti to an RTX 3060 Ti, I won an RTX 3080 gaming PC out of the blue. So here’s the crazy story of how it all went down.

The Build Your Super Gaming PC contest

Nvidia and WD hosted a one-of-a-kind contest

The best part of it all is that I wasn’t even following any of the WD or Nvidia socials back in 2022. All of my tech content consumption happened mostly on YouTube, but WD and Nvidia focused on Instagram to spread the word about their “Build Your Super Gaming PC” contest. Fortunately, there was a tech influencer I used to follow whose Insta story brought news of the contest to my feed.

The contest tasked participants with assigning a fixed number of points across 8 PC components to build the most “balanced” gaming PC. The component choices were limited to what the contest portal listed under each part category, such as CPU, GPU, motherboard, and so on. Every option had a small description of the component’s capabilities and the cost in terms of the points.

Not all categories had specific model names; some were simply labeled “B550 motherboard” or “6-core CPU.” The only categories with complete model names were, naturally, the GPU and storage, since Nvidia and WD were the ones sponsoring the grand prizes. At first, I picked an 8-core CPU with the RTX 3070, but I changed it to a 6-core CPU and the RTX 3080 (along with the WD Black SN770) for more gaming performance.

For the rest of the build, I selected a B550 motherboard, 32GB of DDR4-3600 RAM, an 850W PSU, and an ATX case. The rules mandated posting a snapshot of the final submission on our personal Instagram profile, tagging WD_Black and Nvidia. I forgot about the whole thing after the submission, but a few weeks later, while scrolling on Instagram, I saw a post from the WD_Black account, announcing the contest winners — and, lo and behold, I had won the top prize.

Related

From Intel dual core to AMD Ryzen 8 core CPU – My 15 years of PC building

I’ve built many gaming PCs but the ones I enjoyed the most are all in the past

Choosing the components

Now comes the tricky part

After the exhilaration of the win subsided a bit, the wait for the next steps began. A few weeks passed before WD reached out to me with the instructions — pick 6 components for your build apart from the GPU and SSD. If you’re wondering, I couldn’t make any changes to the GPU (RTX 3080 FE) and SSD (WD Black SN770) I had selected during the contest. I could, however, use the remaining $900 for the CPU, cooler, motherboard, RAM, PSU, and case for my brand-new build.

Going with a white-themed build was a no-brainer, as I really liked the clean aesthetic. For the CPU, I wanted one of the upcoming Ryzen 7000 chips at the time, but due to a tight deadline, I could only pick a Zen 3 chip. The obvious choice was the Ryzen 5 5600, but I gave in to the temptation and picked the 8-core Ryzen 7 5700X. I picked a budget B550 Gigabyte Aorus motherboard with onboard Wi-Fi, 32GB of DDR4-3600 RGB RAM from G.Skill, and a 240mm white AIO cooler from Cooler Master.

For the PSU, I decided to splurge a little and went for the EVGA SuperNova 850 GT, an 80+ Gold modular power supply. Lastly, for the case, I chose the Lian Li Lancool II Mesh RGB in white. I didn’t think assigning real money instead of virtual points would prove a lot more stressful, but I finally completed the component selection on the partner vendor’s website, and placed the order with the provided coupon.

I also emailed the vendor with some instructions about the fan configuration and ensured they also added a fan hub, since the number of headers on the motherboard wasn’t enough for the build. In my impatience, I badgered them to share some WIP images of the PC being built. They were nice enough to send me multiple images showing the PC in all its RGB glory, rocking a classy dual-tone aesthetic.

Related

5 PC hardware purchases I’m most proud of

After 15 years of building PCs, these are the products I cherish the most

The long wait begins

6 weeks to get my hands on the PC

I had placed the order around mid-July, and my birthday was coming on August 6th, so I naturally followed up with the vendor multiple times to see if they could deliver the PC before the date. Little did I know that I would have to wait another month after my birthday for the PC to arrive at my home. The courier company delivered it in a weird wooden crate (not the one you’d expect) which my brother and I had to disassemble ourselves.

After many hours of work that lacked any finesse, and some help from a carpenter, we were finally able to dismantle the crate, remove the bubble wrap, and reveal the PC inside. This was the first time I laid eyes on my new gaming PC without a screen in between us. After admiring the build for some time, and installing the RTX 3080 Founders Edition, which arrived separately in its own box, we were ready to power the PC on for the first time.

Before we did that, I noticed the inside of the side panel had multiple scratches. Stopping me from panicking, my brother remembered that, while we had made a show of removing the outer peel, neither of us had remembered to remove the inner peel, which had the scratches on. With a sigh of relief, I removed it, and we powered the PC on to see the RGB lightshow for the first time.

After moving my other SSD from my older PC to the new one, I was ready to play Cyberpunk 2077, a game that I was actively avoiding in hopes that more patches would improve the performance even further. The RTX 3080 and Ryzen 7 5700X were more than capable of running the game at 60+ FPS at 1440p High ray-traced settings, and most of that day went into admiring the sights of Night City.

Related

Can it play Cyberpunk 2077? For only $450, this PC surprisingly can.

Playing Cyberpunk 2077 on the cheapest gaming PC isn’t sane, by any means. But, can it be done?

The biggest win of my life

Winning this RTX 3080 gaming PC was one of the highlights of my adult life, and it successfully changed my view on participating in contests and giveaways — because you never know which one you might win. The fact that the contest I actually won was based on merit and not on luck made the win even sweeter. I had almost committed to a GPU upgrade in mid-2022, but this PC allowed me to delay it to at least 2025.