Lots of parts swapping going on…
First I bought a used Q9650 CPU and did a 3-way swap on my old systems:
Q9650 replaced Q9450
Q9450 replaced Q6600
Q6600 replaced E5800
Next I bought a used system very, very cheaply off Craigslist. Specs:
Intel I7-3770
Intel DZ77SL-50k Z77 mobo
16GB Crucial memory
EVGA NvidiaGeforce GTX560TI
OCZ Agility4 SSD 128GB
WD 1TB HD
Antec DF-10 case
Asus Blu-Ray
650watt PSU
Razer BlackWidow keyboard
R.A.T. gaming mouse
The system was “put together by a local computer shop”. Grrrr… I been fixing some of these guys stuff for years. Surprisingly this computer was put together very nicely. The system was filthy. Doesn’t anyone clean their computers?
Before buying I did my research. The DZ77SL-50k motherboard has a lot of complaints so I bought this system knowing I might have to ditch it.
Sure enough…
The Intel DZ77SL-50k is one of the worst motherboards I’ve ever run across. The UEFI BIOS is almost useless and this board seems to have issues with PCI-E graphics. So, off to Amazon. I bought a used Gigabyte motherboard. It arrived dead (one-star feedback anyone?).
I decided on a new ASRock Z77 Extreme4.
I also went with Windows 8.1. Despite the Metro crud, it is simply a better OS under the hood than Win 7.
I will dual-boot with openSUSE 13.2 when there are working AMD Radeon drivers but the goal of this system is:
1 – To have a modern(ish)UEFI board.
2 – To stop the multi-boot madness and start using VM’s more.
I bought another 16GB of RAM, a Samsung 850 Pro SSD, and a Radeon R9 270X (moved the Nvdia card to my old system).
New system specs below:
Intel I7-3770 CPU
ASRock Z77 Extreme4 motherboard
32GB Crucial Ballistix memory
AMD Radeon R9 270X 4GB DDR5 GDR
Samsumn 850 Pro SSD 256GB (OSs)
OCZ Agility4 SSD 128GB (VMs, etc)
Intel 530 SSD 180GB (storage)
Seagate 3TB HD (storage)
Creative X-Fi Fatil1ty sound card
Rosewill BLACKHAWK-ULTRA case
Desktop, click on pic for full-size image.
My old system went into the case from above.
This ought to hold me for 2-3 years. Of course that’s what I said about the last system, 6 1/2 years ago!
Hopefully I will be able to afford a dual-monitor setup soon. Maybe Black Friday?
That about covers it!