Urgh! PC upgrading confusion.....please help!

Myranda

Silly Digital... 

http://www.ebuyer.com/291430-asus-p9x79-pro-socket-2011-8-channel-audio-atx-motherboard-p9x79-pro

+ two of the 32GB sets of rams...

digitalscream

Fair play. I've been out of the game a while, still a little rusty.

Myranda

I've been planning budget computers for a while now... 

digitalscream

Yes, I can tell :P

I left performance computers behind a long time ago. I've got a 5-year old Core i7 920, 8GB RAM, 60GB SSD and 2TB Seagate. While I don't game, my usage is pretty hard on the computer and yet I don't have any issues with performance at all. I think I've actually reached the point where further upgrades aren't remotely necessary, until there's a fundamental paradigm shift. I suppose I'll eventually go fully-SSD when 1TB SSDs come down to a reasonable price, but that's about it for the next few years I think.

Myranda

I'm on a quick-ish machine... but I get some degree of satisfaction building a computer at a budget I can afford that's capable of gaming at high resolutions.

So I'm building my PC over time like Round The Bend is.

Started off with some bits from ebay

Intel G820 CPU

Asus P8Z77M-Pro

2 GB of ultra cheap RAM

120GB HDD that sounded a little like a chainsaw

560W PSU

Over time that morphed into

An HTPC 

Intel G820

Gigabyte H77N Wifi motherboard

1gb of ultra cheap RAM (one of the two sticks died... to death - replacements are on the list)

60gb SSD

0 HDD the chainsaw drive died... I think an HTPC needs a spinny drive... it's on the list.

420W 80+ PSU

Fractal Design Node 304 - this is a lovely little case

Gaming PC

i7 3770K

P8Z77M-Pro

120GB SSD

8GB 1866MHz RAM

2TB HDD spinning away

AMD 7850 card that makes the pretties happen...

Razer Tiamat 7.1 Surround Sound headphone

2x 24" 1080p Monitors

560W PSU

There's still stuff on the list...

2 HDDs for the HTPC set up in RAID

1 More Monitor for the gaming machine

1 TV to attach to the HTPC

4GB of reasonable RAM on the 

Proper internal bluray drive

water-cooling

external fan controller that's also a remote control receiver...

Also... I want to build a cloud server... 

Xeon quad core processor

32GB of RAMs

4 2TB spinny drives

Windows Server 2012 Datacentre edition (I might have found a less than completely legit copy, but then given that it's essentially for learning software MS can **** *** if they think I'm spending £3000 on an OS)

4 Raspberry Pis running Raspberry Pi Thin Client

4 little monitors.

All while earning a pittance budgetting for that sort of thing takes imagination and guile... and occasionally a being a highwayman... highwaywoman? highwayperson?

Then trade it all in for a giant robot and some lasers!

roundthebend

roundthebend said:

The PC is about 5 years old, running a Core 2 Duo E6300 at 1.8MHz I think. 4GB RAM.

He plays Minecraft and WoW just now and wants to record video of his gaming. He says it's working quite well today with WoW and video recording, so the GPU might give it some extra.

We're planning to upgrade the CPU and maybe put an SSD in. It's a gradual process as we haven't got budget for it.

Turns out our CPU is the Pentium E6300 at 2.8GHz which is a lot better. Still pretty crap though, but it's working OK.

PSU ordered.