Long overdue upgrade

[Darkend]Viper

[Darkend]Viper

[Darkend]Viper

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
1,360
Location
Bamber Bridge
Hi all,

I'm currently running the following system:

Core something or other 2140 - 1.6ghz
74Gb raptor drive
4gb ddr2 corsair ram
various other sata drives ranging from 120gb to 640gb
Intel motherboard, Nothing special all on board matx job, based on 945 chipset.
Akasa eclipse 62 case
iiyama 17" Prolite E431s
256 nvidia 7800gtx
Hiper 650w modualr psu

Now i'm looking to upgrade as i'm wanting to cut down on the number of external drives i've got. But main uses for PC are:

VMware for testing, I use MDT, WDS, server 2008 R2 to help with MCITP studies and test things for when I try it at work.
Media server to stream to PS3
very light gaming use, well not really any games now as I use PS3 for gaming.

Now i've been looking at having the following items to upgrade machine.
Asrock Z68 Extreme4
Core i5 2600k
8gb ram

or just buying a HP Microserver. Can anyone help with what I should do? i'm not too bothered about boot times due to fact machine is very rarely switched off, only rebooted for software installs and updates. Things i'd like from the system are, 8gb ram, gigabit lan, either single or supports teaming and 8 sata ports. Ability to run VMWare, ESXi would be a bonus then I can run WHS in a virtual machine. I've got a lot of large vmware files, made a copy of servers at work to bring home for testing purposes and each one is about 250-300gb, and there's maybe 10 virtual machines, only have about 4-5 running at once.

Budget will be around £500ish. Mainly looking to change mobo, cpu and ram and buy a couple of 2tb drives. Been looking at i5 but am open to AMD offerings, but i'd like it to last a good few years, current bits are between 3 and 7 years old. Or do I just look for a quad core 775 chip and mobo with lots of sata, gigabyte P35-DS3R has 8.

TIA

Ste
 
wow, another hiper PSU user. i honestly thought they had all gone bang, but now about 5 turn up in a week.

why am i surprised by this? check this out:
the hiper explosive club (14 members and growing)

someone posted in there recently saying how his hiper PSU caught fire, which burnt everything inside his computer

what you have said you are thinking about is the right thing to get: i5 2500k, asrock Z68 extreme 4 and the cheapest 2x4GB DDR3 ram you can find that doesnt have silly heatsinks like the Gskill ripjaws or the corsair vengance.
oh, and a decent cooler for it

as for the PSU, something like the antec 620W high current gamer which is on offer this week will be great, unless you decide to use two big graphics cards, in which case you will need a bigger PSU

*edit*
all my suggestions here:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - OEM £156.98
1 x Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £144.98
1 x Corsair XMS3 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX8GX3M2A1600C9) £69.98
1 x Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen 2TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD204UI) £53.99
1 x Antec High Current Gamer 620W Power Supply £49.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 Pro Extreme Performance CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/1155/1156/1366/AM3/AM2+/AM2) £24.98
Total : £500.92 (includes shipping: FREE).

i assume you know that by linking your forum account and your shop account you get free shipping
 
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