Associate
***Will a mod please move this to somewhere more appropriate if it doesn't belong here. I wasn't sure where to put it. Thank you.***
Hello folks,
I'm still kind of new around here so haven't posted anything particularly exciting yet. Well, that's not about to change now.
After struggling by on an S775 PC for the past 5 years with a string of minor upgrades when secondhand prices allowed, I ended up at a Q9550 overclocked to 3.6GHz with 8GB of DDR2-800 on tight timings in an ASUS P5E motherboard running a Rampage Formula BIOS. This was paired up with a recently acquired MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III Boost Edition that I picked up from eBay for £80 delivered, still in the original retail packaging with all of the associated original goodies.
Life seemed good until I started looking at the framerates other people were getting with the same graphics card but with much newer CPUs and faster RAM. I'd clearly reached the end of the road with S775, and as there'd been a 5 year gap since my last platform upgrade and Skylake seemed to be providing very good bang-per-buck, I decided to bite the bullet and see what I could do with around £450 in the hopes of building something that should keep me happy for another few years.
I was still very happy with the £25 white AVP Commander X8 mid tower inverted ATX case I bought just last year, as well as with the CoolerMaster GX650W PSU (massively under-run and barely gets the chill off it, so it's fine) and Arctic Cooling F8 and F12 case fans I already had, so all that was needed was a new CPU, HSF, RAM, motherboard, and the luxury of a bigger and faster SSD than the old 40GB Intel X25-V I'd been getting by with for the past 5 years.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAoWGpQVkRqeDhwSE0
An i5 6600K, a Raijintek Aidos HSF (amazing performance for the money), 8GB (2x4) of HyperX Predator DDR4-3200 (crazy low sale price, so I couldn't resist), Gigabyte GA-Z170-Gaming K3 motherboard, and a Samsung 256GB SM951 NVMe M.2 SSD were duly ordered. Total at time of purchase was £448 delivered. Woohoo! On target!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvYnpQRt5f6gDqoeshLy0nivSom0MbgjxQ
(HSF now reversed to put pranged side to bottom where it can't be seen. CBA to return it and it's working just fine.)
To cut a long story short, the build went without a hitch, overclocking to a stable 4.5GHz took under half an hour (although stress tested for much longer, obviously), and minimum framerates in nearly all of my favourite recent games pretty much doubled allowing the use of 'Ultra' settings in nearly all of them with 60FPS+ at 1080p. I had no idea what a massive bottleneck even a fast quadcore C2D was nowadays for gaming, so to say I was chuffed would be a huge understatement.
I don't have a particularly good camera right now, but I've taken one shot to show the beasty at night with the motherboard's red LEDs and my UV strips glowing. Bling isn't usually my thing, but it seemed well worth having it look nice at night when the case has smoked acrylic side windows.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAoUHVOTjVkZktsaTg
I picked up a new 3TB WD Red yesterday for an amazing £55 delivered (thanks largely to an eBay discount voucher) so that's it for now, unless the money from the sale of the old kit I've replaced goes towards an AMD RX480 graphics card later in the year. Maybe...
Hello folks,
I'm still kind of new around here so haven't posted anything particularly exciting yet. Well, that's not about to change now.
After struggling by on an S775 PC for the past 5 years with a string of minor upgrades when secondhand prices allowed, I ended up at a Q9550 overclocked to 3.6GHz with 8GB of DDR2-800 on tight timings in an ASUS P5E motherboard running a Rampage Formula BIOS. This was paired up with a recently acquired MSI R7950 Twin Frozr III Boost Edition that I picked up from eBay for £80 delivered, still in the original retail packaging with all of the associated original goodies.
Life seemed good until I started looking at the framerates other people were getting with the same graphics card but with much newer CPUs and faster RAM. I'd clearly reached the end of the road with S775, and as there'd been a 5 year gap since my last platform upgrade and Skylake seemed to be providing very good bang-per-buck, I decided to bite the bullet and see what I could do with around £450 in the hopes of building something that should keep me happy for another few years.
I was still very happy with the £25 white AVP Commander X8 mid tower inverted ATX case I bought just last year, as well as with the CoolerMaster GX650W PSU (massively under-run and barely gets the chill off it, so it's fine) and Arctic Cooling F8 and F12 case fans I already had, so all that was needed was a new CPU, HSF, RAM, motherboard, and the luxury of a bigger and faster SSD than the old 40GB Intel X25-V I'd been getting by with for the past 5 years.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAoWGpQVkRqeDhwSE0
An i5 6600K, a Raijintek Aidos HSF (amazing performance for the money), 8GB (2x4) of HyperX Predator DDR4-3200 (crazy low sale price, so I couldn't resist), Gigabyte GA-Z170-Gaming K3 motherboard, and a Samsung 256GB SM951 NVMe M.2 SSD were duly ordered. Total at time of purchase was £448 delivered. Woohoo! On target!
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1IvYnpQRt5f6gDqoeshLy0nivSom0MbgjxQ
(HSF now reversed to put pranged side to bottom where it can't be seen. CBA to return it and it's working just fine.)
To cut a long story short, the build went without a hitch, overclocking to a stable 4.5GHz took under half an hour (although stress tested for much longer, obviously), and minimum framerates in nearly all of my favourite recent games pretty much doubled allowing the use of 'Ultra' settings in nearly all of them with 60FPS+ at 1080p. I had no idea what a massive bottleneck even a fast quadcore C2D was nowadays for gaming, so to say I was chuffed would be a huge understatement.
I don't have a particularly good camera right now, but I've taken one shot to show the beasty at night with the motherboard's red LEDs and my UV strips glowing. Bling isn't usually my thing, but it seemed well worth having it look nice at night when the case has smoked acrylic side windows.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAoUHVOTjVkZktsaTg
I picked up a new 3TB WD Red yesterday for an amazing £55 delivered (thanks largely to an eBay discount voucher) so that's it for now, unless the money from the sale of the old kit I've replaced goes towards an AMD RX480 graphics card later in the year. Maybe...
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