Last week I revealed the three components that would form the core of my new gaming rig. DABS delivered them promptly on the following Monday and that evening I set about putting it all together.
For a bit of context, the first time I built a computer, 10 years-or-so ago, I completely, utterly cocked it. I actually managed to screw the motherboard directly into the chassis, rather than onto the mounting thingies, promptly shorting the entire thing when I tried to turn it on. Not an auspicious start.
My next build was considerably better, but still took me the best part of a day to complete, with much stress and fiddling about, all the while convinced I was breaking everything and throwing away hundreds of pounds of kit.
This time round, it took me an hour and a half. And that was partly due to working in a tiny room crowded with random toddler paraphernalia.
I’m not sure whether I’m more adept at fiddling around inside a computer case or whether computers have simply got easier to self-build (I suspect a bit of both), but either way I was very pleasantly surprised.
Motherboards have changed a lot since I bought my last system. You can use a mouse in the BIOS! Quite remarkable. The Z97-A has a bunch of built-in overclocking gubbins which seems to have done a good job. Still, I was expecting minimal noticeable benefits in games – this was more about getting up to date, hopefully improving loading times due to DDR3 and faster SATA connections.
Instead, the two games which were really taxing my old system – Titanfall and Star Citizen – have gone from barely playable on low settings to running rather smoothly on very high. It’s a massive, massive change and very welcome indeed.
Funnily enough, RPS published an article today with CPU recommendations, their main one being the one I just purchased. So I guess I did my research properly!
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