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Be aware that HP cases and power supplies can have funny shapes/ connectors and placements due to them trying to cram as much as possible in a small space.

I would personally save longer and budget for a new case and psu sorry :(
 
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Edit: That link does work for me - different browsers not liking it? His is an older model as the motherboard is an LGA775 board.

That does look pretty normal, but make sure the motherboard mounting holes on any new board do line up with the old board.

I agree that companies like HP and Dell do use some funky connectors but it does seem like your board is a standard m-ATX board.

Are you building a Solidworks PC for study use or professional use? That bundle will work, but 8GB of RAM isn't much for CAD work. SW doesn't really make that much use of multiple cores/threads outside of simulations and rendering, so an i5 will work in a budget build.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £288.47
(includes shipping: £10.50)

The i5-6600 is just a little faster than the 6500 - 3.9GHz turbo compared to 3.6GHz for the 6500. Whether it's worth the extra £10-15 is debatable. It's still a non-K CPU so it will come with the stock fan and cooler and is cheaper than the 6600K. As I mentioned before, 16GB RAM is what I would use in a budget CAD build and the motherboard is the same as before.

For reference, I use SolidWorks at work every day. My CAD workstation is a hex-core Xeon with 32GB ECC server RAM and a Quadro K2000. It flies through everything I can chuck at it but large, complex assemblies do sometimes slow it down due to the lack of multi-core optimisation.
 
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Edit: That link does work for me - different browsers not liking it? His is an older model as the motherboard is an LGA775 board.

That does look pretty normal, but make sure the motherboard mounting holes on any new board do line up with the old board.

I agree that companies like HP and Dell do use some funky connectors but it does seem like your board is a standard m-ATX board.

Are you building a Solidworks PC for study use or professional use? That bundle will work, but 8GB of RAM isn't much for CAD work. SW doesn't really make that much use of multiple cores/threads outside of simulations and rendering, so an i5 will work in a budget build.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £288.47
(includes shipping: £10.50)

The i5-6600 is just a little faster than the 6500 - 3.9GHz turbo compared to 3.6GHz for the 6500. Whether it's worth the extra £10-15 is debatable. It's still a non-K CPU so it will come with the stock fan and cooler and is cheaper than the 6600K. As I mentioned before, 16GB RAM is what I would use in a budget CAD build and the motherboard is the same as before.

For reference, I use SolidWorks at work every day. My CAD workstation is a hex-core Xeon with 32GB ECC server RAM and a Quadro K2000. It flies through everything I can chuck at it but large, complex assemblies do sometimes slow it down due to the lack of multi-core optimisation.

The bundle was used to familiarise myself at home. with solidworks again after not using ithe for a while . I do CAD at work using Autodesk Inventor and our machines struggle with Intel xeon e5-1620 and 16gb ram . The reason I need did works at home is a potential problems orion at work could be on te horizon and I need to be familiar with solidworks. Appreciate your response though .think I will try and get 16gb ram
 
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Yeah, if you've got something potentially important coming up, 16GB will make the experience much more pleasant.

We don't have Inventor, so I don't know how it compares from a performance viewpoint.

My 2 colleagues have e5-1620s and 32GB RAM. The 1620 is pretty much a stock Sandy i7. Somehow I lucked out and eneded up with the e5-1650 machine when it became free. Prior to that I was using a i5-2400 and 8GB RAM. That was painful at times!
 
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im still quite new to the pc building. can you explain the the difference between 6600 and 6600k ? Also if i buy the parts you suggested is it a case of just fitting them , turning pc back on again and its all done ?
 
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The 6600K is the unlocked (overclockable) CPU and doesn't come with the stock cooler. The 6600 is the 'regular' version. Only the 'K' CPUs are fully unlocked and you pay more for one as a result. For a workstation, an overclock is not a good idea as it can make the system unstable and cause crashes.

You'll need to reinstall Windows I'm afraid. You're changing all the key components. Even if Windows did just allow you to reactivate, the drivers will almost certainly conflict and cause issues. It's a lot safer to just backup everything and start again.

Do you have a solid state drive? It's well worth having one as your boot drive/ 'C' Drive as it will make everything much faster.
 
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SSDs have no moving parts so you can stick them anywhere. I've got one at home that's stuck to the case with velcro - no issues with it at all.
 
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TBH it doesn't matter which RAM you get. You wil get a very slight performance increase with 2400MHz compared to 2133MHz. From a stability point of view, 2133MHz could be more stable as 2400MHz is technically an overclock. Any DDR4 will run at 2133MHz - it's the industry standard speed. As long as you're happy with what you get, stick with it.

It depends if you're going to store all your models/drawings on the SSD. We have 240GB SSDs at work and they're fine for what we need. 500/512GB SSDs are quite expensive, so unless you need the extra storage, it's better to have a traditional HDD for bulk storage.
 
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ive ordered the motherboard and Ram this week , been looking at the power supply and the stock PSU is only 220w thinking i should probably get a bigger one if im adding an ssd too . Anybody got any advice on this ?
 
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You will need to reinstall windows due to changing motherboard chipsets. Your current windows key likely wont work because it is 99.999% likely tied to your OEM machine.

This is all such a bad idea... That case has nearly zero ventilation and you want to put a 90+W TDP CPU in it? It's just a bad move.

Please get yourself a proper case and power supply. If you need a new windows license you can get it for about 25 quid from kingwin.net.

If you do not have windows install media you can create it on a blank DVD or USB stick. Google "download windows (7/8/10)" and follow the instructions on the microsoft website.

Have you ever done this before? Is this your first time building?
 
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