Tech

PC Upgrade Time… Again

benchmark

The last time I upgraded was about a year and a half ago, but that time I was really only adding a 2nd graphics card. I have actually been wanting to upgrade my CPU for a while now, but until now the only real upgrade was the 4770k which was still only 4 cores. Sure, I would get hyper threading but that didn’t seem like a worthwhile upgrade to me. Now that the new Haswell-E CPUs are out, I decided that it was finally worth it. Going from 4 Cores with 4 threads to 6 cores and 12 threads is pretty noticeable in specific workloads, but its not much of a difference for games yet. There are a few games out there that benefit from the extra cores, such as Battlefield 4, but for the most part it doesn’t really matter right now. However, I am starting to see games recommend more cores, and expect this to be the norm once this current console generation is in full swing.

Of course Haswell-E requires a new motherboard and DDR4 ram, so I had to upgrade those as well. The prices for DDR4 are pretty crazy right now, and the motherboards and CPUs are not cheap either. I also got a new CPU cooler, because my old H60 wouldn’t be able to handle the overclocking I plan to do with this CPU.

The build went pretty well for the most part. The only issue I had was due to mixing an older case with a newer motherboard. The 600T has 4 USB2 ports on the case. Add to that the card reader that I have and the USB connection on the H100i and I was a few internal USB2 headers short. So I ended up buying a NZXT IU01 to add some additional internal ports to connect everything up.

All of my old parts are going into a new HTPC that I am building. It should work nicely for Steam In-Home Streaming and media center duties. Once that build is done I will make a post about it as well.

My new specs are:

Processor: Intel Core i7-5930K @ 4.5ghz
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i w/ Air Series SP120 Fans
Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 2800
Primary Hard Drive: 256 GB Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series
Other Drives: Over 7.5TB of storage
Optical Drive: LG Blu-ray Burner
Video Card: 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 in SLI
Monitor: Asus VG236H 120Hz 3D Monitor
Speakers/Headphones: Corsair Vengeance 2100 Wireless 7.1 Gaming Headset & Logitech X-540 5.1 Speakers
Keyboard: Corsair Vengeance K90
Mouse: Corsair M95
Mouse Surface: Corsair MM600
Operating System: Windows 8.1 Pro 64-bit
Motherboard: ASUS X99-DELUXE
Computer Case: Corsair Graphite Series 600T
Power Supply: Corsair HX Series HX750
Card Reader: NZXT Aperture M
Lighting: NZXT Hue