A new updated home development computer was needed and so began the long process of finding what was happening in the world of the PC.
In my opinion I think the PC is about to become popular once again after people have become tired of tablets and phones. The graphical quality in PC games now supersedes that of popular consoles.
First consideration when starting on a PC is decide on the processor; AMD or Intel, I went with Intel, mainly because of familiarity programming them for many years. I learnt there was a new family of processors called Skylake which took advantage of DDR4 RAM. I definitely wanted to move up from my current dual-core machine, I couldn’t justify the cost of an i7 so an i5 6500 was my sweet-spot.
Next to decide if overclocking was of interest, in my case no. This dictates the type of motherboard and cooler needed (water or air-cooling). I went for an H170 chipset with a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo air cooler.
The next quandary is graphics card; ATI or NVIDIA, I went for NVIDIA so decision made, then it’s which model 950, 750 TI, 960, 970 etc. etc.
Stop already! I was wondering at this point if it weren’t better to purchase a pre-built system.
I’m not looking for anything greater than 1080p based on my current monitor, 1440p next year 🙂 So I decided the GTX 960 is want I want and I managed to get one with 4GB VRAM for a good price, see the links below. 1080p makes for a fantastic gaming experience.
No, so now on to the case; cost, aesthetics, ATX, mATX mothrboard size? Argh, when does this end? Well when I chose a NZXT S340; it looks good, has a cool inspection side panel, doesn’t waste any time and resources on optical drives, which I haven’t used in a good while now.
So order the parts and wait. Once it arrived we assembled it and all went extremely well, it’s not difficult there are plenty of helpful videos on YouTube.
Was it worth it? Well the cost saving was minuscule, the wait for all the parts excruciating, though the building/assembly (no not assembly language) was fun though.
I really shouldn’t be looking at 34″ curved monitors. O dear, maybe the next blog post?
Here is a YouTube video of the assembled build:
The individual components I used are listed below. Please understand that these are affiliate links i.e. if you were to purchase using one of the links I’d get a commission (which would be just spiffing).