So yeah, it's that time.



I've been having some issues with the old beastie a few times, but I took a "que sera, sera" attitude to it as it was already so old. For example, it wouldn't boot up once or twice, and I've noticed that the power supply had been making a constant faint buzzing sound. It even leaked some power unto the case at some point, which was mildly unpleasant when changing cables etc. So yeah, not exactly a shock (pun not intended).

It still chugged along though, until very recently. It suddenly refused to boot for 3 days, and then, without any intervention, would boot up like nothing happened again. Jesus power. It worked for another 2 weeks, but I noticed it would reset the PC clock on two different occasions. Then, yesterday, gone. Not even a beep or a fan, nothing. The only sound or light was the faint buzzing of the PSU ahaha. Checked all the cables of course but couldn't see anything wrong.

So, my assessment was that either it was a fried PSU (not booting at all, the faint buzzing) or the CMOS battery had gone (the clock resetting, not booting some days but booting on others). The CMOS battery can stop the PC from booting at all too, but from what I've read it's fairly uncommon. So, for convience sake, and because I probably should have the PSU replaced anyway, I took a gamble on it being the PSU and ordered a nice new 650w corsair one.

It wasn't the PSU.

On the bright side - it served me well for 10 years (!) with only a GPU upgrade during that entire time. And I just got a nice severance fee from my previous work. I also already have a brand new PSU (heh), a large HD to use as storage, and don't have urgent need for new peripherals. I may even recycle the GPU once I check how it holds up today. Probably not well, but hey.

So what I need now is to assemble, or have assembled for me,

- a case
- a mobo
- CPU + fan
- RAM
- an SSD
- GPU (?)


Fairly excited about becoming an SSD man. The RAM ad GPU I can figure out for myself, as well as the case.

I wonder if you guys have any input on the mobo and CPU, though? Would be very much appreciated as I've been out of the building game for a while. Also, which SSD brand is considered market leader these days? I'm thinking of going big, 350 or 400 GB.

It's too damn hot to play games inside, so take your time.

Lol, I didn't realize your PC was actually older than mine. Mine's been on its last legs for over a year now.

Anyway, you prefer Intel or AMD? If you don't care, or are Intel, you should probably go with a core i5. No need to go for a core i7 unless you're going to be doing hardcore stuff besides gaming (like video editing or something). Something like a 6500 or something.



If you think you're going to overclock, then pop on up to a k model (6500k). If you prefer AMD, you'll have to look for someone else to advise you.

As for motherboards, if you're going for a Skylake CPU (6000 series), which you really should, make sure you get a motherboard that support DDR4 RAM. There's no point in getting one that only does DDR3. Might as well future proof. I'm a fan of Gigabyte, MSI, and Asus, but you'll probably want to research the specific board models to see if it's something you want or not.

As far as SSDs, it's been my experience that it doesn't really matter so much what manufacturer you get. Samsung has a really good name, but SSDs seem to be pretty solid nowadays regardless of who you get it from. I've bought from Sandisk, Intel, AData, and Corsair (I think) with no failures so far.

Something to keep in mind is m.2 as well. If you get a motherboard that supports m.2 with 4 lanes of PCIE, you can get much better performance than a standard SSD. Most SSDs are saturating the SATA bandwidth.. they all top out around 500MB/sec read and write performance. You jump up to m.2, and there are drives pushing 2500+MB/sec read. Of course, they're more expensive. Personally, I plan on picking up a 512MB m.2 SSD for boot drive and games, then a 1TB normal SSD for other stuff. You could also just get a motherboard that supports the slot, but defer actually buying the m.2 SSD until prices come down some more. This is the m.2 SSD I've been eying.



However, I would recommend to NOT get a motherboard that supports multiple m.2 slots. m.2 requires 4 PCIE lanes for max performance, and most of the motherboards that support multiple slots will have them split lanes... eg, 1 slot with 4 lanes, or 2 slots with 2 lanes each. PCIE lanes are also used to power USB, PCIE slots (like for the GPU), etc, and the CPU can only push so many lanes. So when a motherboard is offering a lot of m.2 slots, or a ton of usb or something, you're basically sacrificing PCIE slots from one area to another. This took me a while to figure out, hence why I'm mentioning it.

Some other things to keep in mind is USB 3.1 with the type-c connector. USB 3.1 is fairly new and faster than USB 3.0, so that's good. And the type-c connect is the new connector, which is reversible. No more having to figure out which side of the USB plug goes up. Mostly this is just future proofing, but if you plan on keeping this machine for another 9 years, that's probably a good idea.

What graphics card do you have? I'm sure it'll be fine, I just can't recall.

Lol, I hear you about being old. I caught myself talking about how young some chick looked recently, then realized she was totally boning age. Makes me feel ancient.

Regarding motherboards, I have no strong feelings about what you should go with. If you want MSI, I have no issues with it. Personally I've been eyeing this Asus TUF Sabertooth motherboard, but it's probably overkill.



As for you not hearing about m.2, I'm not surprised. Most people haven't. Don't take that as a dig against you, just that m.2 isn't that big of a deal yet. However, all of this stuff is low power. It's not going to push up your power requirements. In fact, I was looking at SLI GTX 1080s with a core i7, a 1TB SSD and an m.2 SSD and the power estimating pages pointed me to a 550 watt PSU. So, 650 watts for what you're looking at should be plenty. If you're concerned, just google for a power supply estimation utility and punch in your gear. There are several out there.

Lol at your graphics card. I don't know how you managed to play XCOM 2. I have a gtx 670, which is admittedly ancient, but way faster than a gtx 560. But hey, whatever, more power to you. My current PC has 18 GB of DDR3 RAM. I plan on building my next box with 32GB to start, maybe 64GB depending on my budget. I'll be buying all my parts August 15th, even if I have to throw it on a credit card. Tired of waiting.

Hahaha seems like I caught you at a good time for advice, as the itch was getting unbearable for you too.

Lol @ that motherboard. "Probably overkill" he says. It looks like something built for military activity in space. Not to mention the cost! I'm all for good motherboards, but let's say that around 200 dollars is really the absolute maximum for me when it comes to them.

Ok, so the brand probably doesn't matter too much for the motherboard, as long as it has all the features I need/want. I'll obviously run it through some sites like Tom's Hardware before committing to anything first, just to see it's decent value for money.

Power seems good too then, since I'm definitely not going SLI which is already a pretty big difference You sound like you're gonna build an absolute beast. Looking forward to it.

As for how I played XCOM2...barely. I had to turn it down to the lowest settings (ok, not ULTRA low, but still) and it still loaded for 2 minutes on every mission and would suffer FPS drops every time something other than a basic movement or shooting action took place. Even the cutscenes were fucked, as the images would lag behind the audio. So yeah, basically, XCOM2 was telling me 'this is as far as you'll go with this rig man'.

I just took out the CMOS battery and am gonna see if I can buy a replacement nearby. Since it's only a few euros, I might as well see if it makes a difference. I'm still gonna build a new PC, but at least I would be able to use this time in the mean time. Maybe.

Switching out the battery didn't help. So with a new PSU and a new motherboard battery it's beginning to very much look like the motherboard is fried. I mean, I don't even get a fan whirring, not a sound, nothing. It's just...dead. Oh well. NEW PC TIME!

Gonna go drinking in a bit, but I'll make some choices later.

So I've looked into things and for the moment I got something like this in mind:

CPU Intel Core i5 6600k skt 1151 Skylake + be quiet! Pure Rock cooler
MSI Z170A GAMING PRO motherboard (specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/MSI ... AMING_PRO/)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB DDR4 2400MHZ (2x8Gb) RAM
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD for primary HD

I already have a new Corsair VS650 PSU, and I will reuse my current 800 GB HDD as a storage drive.

Still checking for a GPU that is good price/quality.

Overkill for Rimworld.

I wanna play it in 8k hahaha

Ah yea, I forgot to mention the USB 3.1 scam. I was aware and totally should have said something. My bad.

A few notes...
CPU - you sure you want a K processor? You plan on overclocking? If not, you can go for a non-K and typically save a little money.
Motherboard looks good
You may want to get a single 16GB stick of RAM instead of 2x8GB. That way you'll have 16GB of RAM and 3 more slots in case you decide to kit it out completely. Would you ever need 64GB of RAM? Probably not. But you can do some neat stuff with RAM drives should the fancy ever strike.
Looks like you're opting to skip the m.2 drive for now. Probably a good choice from your wallet's perspective.

FYI, keep an eye out for a gtx1060. Pretty good performance for pretty cheap. No SLI support though, which may be a deal-breaker for you. Here's a Tom's review.


Prices are a bit out of whack right now, though. Stupid limited availability. Even the gtx1080 and gtx1070 are still screwed up with pricing, and they've been out for months.

You almost made me fall for the scam, ya bastard. Bought by the big USB companies no doubt.

I didn't even know the k series was meant for overclocking, so yeah, gonna go with a non-member version there. Not interested in squeezing every last piece of juice out of my machine. Thanks for the heads up.

I'm not gonna go with m.2 now, but I made sure the motherboard offers it for future changes.

Not sure about the ram...tbh, with the current prices, I can always buy a whole new bunch of it later. So prolly gonna stick with something like this.

Gtx1060 does indeed seem to offer serious power for decent money. Like you, I'm mostly worried with it being in stock at all though. I'm in Romania for work now, but I'll look at it once I'm home again.

Yea. I plan on buying a GTX1080, which has an MSRP of $599. Unfortunately, it's selling for like $660 minimum, with some well over $900. That's completely idiotic. Why would I pay over MSRP for something? Anyway, I might drop $660ish, but not any more than that. Worst case, I buy a GTX1070 for now and get a 1080 (or something better) in a year or so, when the prices have stopped being gauging and colluding. Be hilarious if there was a big class action lawsuit about anti-competitive pricing on these things.

Would you really pay so much for it? I mean, if you got the cash and are willing, why the fuck not, but I always thought the high end GPUs are just way overpriced compared to their not-so-much-older predecessors. I find that for normal gaming, ie not crazy high resolution gaming of a game that pushes the tech in full AA and so on, the difference between the newest , fastest and slightly older cards is minimal. They'll probably offer the same FPS and pretty for those purposes. So for me it makes more sense to upgrade to a new GPU for a kind of budget price a few years down the road than to get the big bad right now.

Being an early adopter is way too rich for my blood.

I would normally agree with you, but I'm jumping into VR with this build, so it actually does matter. In fact, in a year (or maybe 2) when the next generation of VR headsets comes out, I plan on buying a new one, buying the next iteration of graphics cards, then building a second VR gaming PC for my living room.