So one of my friends had their PC unfortunately crash recently. And to that, they said, time for an upgrade. So we discussed something that would last 5 years and would be a fairly decent gaming rig. I came up with these specs for $1000:
Case: Corsair Carbide 300R
Motherboard: MSI Z77A-GD65
CPU: Intel i5-3570K
Heatsink: Tuniq Tower 120 Extreme
RAM: Patriot Gamer 2 2X4GB DDR3-1600
GPU: EVGA GTX 560 DS SSC
HDD: WD Caviar Black 500GB (from old PC) + a new Mushkin Chronos Deluxe 60GB SSD
PSU: OCZ ZT 750W 80+ Bronze
DVDRW: LG GH24NS90
Fans: Xigmatek 140MM XLF-F1455 (x4 @ $5 a piece) + the ones included with the Corsair Case
The parts are now on order (total including tax and shipping was approx 1150), and both him and I are looking forward to the parts in the mail. I will have pictures up the day I receive the parts and I'm sure I'll have pics up of me putting it all together as well in a seperate post later on.
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On a separate topic, Charlie recently gave me an old PC she no longer needed. Inside was a lost gem of a motherboard, a DFI LanParty Ultra-D Socket 939 board. Man, that thing was a beast back in it's day. Unfortunately, the RAM that was installed into the system wasn't cooperating with the motherboard, causing it not to post. Considering it used DDR-400 RAM, I had plenty kicking around to try the system. It definitely did not like the high density RAM that I had lying around, so I tried also some Mushkin Silverline RAM that I had installed into another 939 board prior, and the thing boots up just fine now. I went through and dusted out the computer (sat outside for like 2 hours dusting off the internals and all the components because it sat for so long and looks like it collected a lot of dust when it was in use) and now is fairly respectable inside now. There's still some dust in some hard to reach areas, but it's certainly a fair bit better than the condition I originally received it in. It came packaged in a Coolermaster Centurion 5 case, which is a decent case for it's time with plenty of front ventilation. Also inside, it had an AMD Athlon X2 3800+ which is a decent dual-core CPU as well (but not as well performing gaming-wise as a Core 2 Duo). I've ordered a Deep Cool (or Logisys if you want to go by the brand that procured them) IceWind Pro heat-sink to install on to the system so I can overclock it and see how good I can get it performing. It's a decent performance heat-sink that won't break the bank too much and considering I won't really be using the system, I don't want to drop 60+ dollars on a heat-sink (the IceWind Pro only cost 32 dollars). I'm curious if it will outperform my ASUS 939 board (where the Mushkin Silverline RAM came from) as well as my ASRock motherboard that I was originally running with for years prior to building my i7 rig. My ASRock board outperformed my ASUS board (2.8GHZ vs 2.5GHZ) but I believe that was mostly due to the fact that the ASRock BIOS seemed to have better overclocking capabilities, or it could be that the CPU itself just wasn't up to the task, but we'll see how the DFI rig compares to those two for a general sense of how it's held up over the years.
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