pc upgrade

Gaming PC: Proposed Upgrades

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Now, to business! With the release of Guild Wars 2 this week, and World of Warcraft’s Mists of Pandaria expansion next month, I’m feeling the urge to upgrade my gaming PC a little. Nothing major since my Hackintosh project is far more pressing at the moment and alas my budget won’t stretch to building a completely new gaming PC – much as I’d love to! Currently, my gaming rig is as follows:

Starfury Gaming PC
My Gaming PC, Starfury 🙂

Antec 1200 Case
MSI P7N SLI Platinum motherboard
2.4GHz Intel Quad Core Q6600
4GB Corsair XMS3 DDR2 RAM
500GB Seagate Barracuda HDD
2x 512MB GDDR3 9600GT Nvidia SLI
Windows 7 64bit

Firstly I may start tinkering with the overclock on my CPU again to try and get my 3.0GHz back again. Everything was just that little bit more smooth when sporting 4 x 3.0GHz. I originally was running at 3.0GHz, but when I upgraded my RAM from 2GB to 4GB in Feb this year, I suffered a lot of stability issues. I’d upgraded to 4GB RAM, but since my motherboard’s older now, still DDR2, alas RAM is very expensive so I doubt I’ll be upping this to 8GB anytime soon! It cost £49 just to pick up the cheapest DDR2 2x2GB kit I could find, a price to cringe at considering the same 4GB kit as DDR3 only costs £30 and 8GB barely £35-45. So until my next proper gaming build, the motherboard (an MSI P7N SLI Platinum), CPU and RAM will remain as they are.

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RamblingEpic’s PC Woes

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A while ago now RamblingEpic‘s PC started making what can only be described as God-awful noise! It took us a while to narrow down what was causing the issue as it’d come and go, but eventually we noticed that his PSU had split up the side. His graphics card heatsink was also full of dust and the case was an old, kinda crappy one with no fans. It’s been something he’d made do with for a long time until this happened recently.

He’s a no frills kinda guy, so when I’d finally talked him into letting me replace the case and ESPECIALLY the split PSU currently being held together with electrical tape, he had a few requirements. I’d hoped initially for the Antec 300 or something like it, but he preferred no LEDs, no fancy bits in general, just ‘plain & simple’. After recently having a very good experience building with BitFenix using their Shinobi case, I started looking at their budget cases. RamblingEpic set his seal of approval on the Merc Alpha case and away we went!

The job of swapping cases and replacing the old power supply unit took around 2hrs total, mostly due to having to rewire and cable-tidy everything I could. The old PSU was a 400W so we’ve replaced it with a Corsair 430W Builder Series, the same one I used in my server build last month. Altogether, this little mini-project consisted of the following:

Components

RamblingEpic Case & PSU Swap
Case/PSU Swap Components

BitFenix Merc Alpha Case
BitFenix Spectre 120mm Fan – Black
BitFenix Prebraided Molex to 3pin x3 fan adapter cable – Black
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply

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