New Oil

Why a SSD?
Well it seemed cheap.
I never install things on the C:\\ on purpose, so the size didn’t matter
This vid was impressive
I was thinking of an <80GB HDD but didn’t see one to buy.
Whirlpool recommended it
I should replace my PC in ~7 years so I probably wont hit the read/write limit, and with only the OS on it I wont care (much) if it gets wiped.

Why 8GB of RAM?
Win7 recommended 8GB
Whirlpool recommended 8GB
Ubuntu can use all of it
More is probably better?
My old XP box couldn’t use all the 4GB it had installed, so I planned to swap 2GB it to the new PC, to total ten. But I cant because it isn’t DDR3 memory.
I suppose maybe Pov-Ray will make use of it?

I also took particular care with the case, as I wanted an on button that would work. I nearly bought a miniATX case for the tiny novelty of it. I knew I didn’t want a big box, If I go that way I intend to make it out of wood, so I settled on a squarish one with a simple flat design.
The rest was fairly straight forward to decide, I may put in a wireless card later (could have used it on the first day) I pretty much followed the whirlpool guide and what was available on Umart. In the end this is the package I came up with


I bought BYO with my first paycheck from Bundy Sugar, making it ~5yo. For the last 2 years I have been putting off upgrading it because I don’t like windows. And I haven’t reformatted it because I only have the XP CD without service packs and it takes a whole weekend to reinstall everything I use.
Small things have been annoying me for a while and after a couple of conversations at work I decided to get something new. Possibly I could have upgraded the motherboard to fix my sound card issues and replaced the box so that it would reliably turn on. But I’m the only person left in Technomancers Sojourn with an XP OS and I have the slowest PC and those upgrades would only make it more reliable, not more competitive. With this PC I shouldn’t have to wait for loading screens in GW2 anymore.

For the time being I’ll keep BYO as a spare/server, but when I know I have everything I’ll probably install Ubuntu and thus make it like new. I haven’t even installed any games yet and I’ve already checked out WineDB to see if LOL and GW2 are linux compatible yet. Win7 annoys me when it asks “are you sure you want to do this?” and when I tried to rotate the screen it took me three goes, you would think it could tell if a resolution was compatible or not without my help. I also did the thing again where instead of making a hidden folder visible I accidentally hid the directory that that folder was in.




> ITEMs to Order :
> Intel Core i5 3470 LGA1155 CPU 3.2Ghz 6Mb Cache Ivy Bridge
> ASRock B75-PRO3-M B75 4xDDR3 3xSATA3 PCIex16 GBL 4xUSB3.0 HDMI D-Sub
> DVI-D mATX
> Kingston 8G(2x4G) DDR3 1600MHz CL9 HyperX
> Seagate SATA3 2TB 7200RPM Barracuda 64mb Cache
> Samsung 128GB SSD 830 Series - SATA III 6Gbs, 2xnm Toggle DDR NAND,
> 3-Core ARMv9 MCX Controller
> Sapphire HD7870 OC 2G 256Bit GDDR5 PCIE3.0 DVI HDMI 2*MiniDSP
> SilverStone Temjin series TJ08E Black mATX Cas USB3
> Antec VP-550P 550W Strictly PSU
> Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit OEM(Microsoft OEM
> Terms&condition apply)
>
> TOTAL : $$1128


[Update 23/01/2015]
Doubling the RAM is still the only upgrade I've done.

So my graphics card is the first part to play up, occasionally it would not show any display when booting my PC. Apparently this was a common error in Germany and the fix was to flash the GPU BIOS once you can get the card to initialise properly. But I didn’t get it flash properly. Contacted support and they recommended I buy a new card because it was old. While ATI cards are usually more effective use of funds I’ve found the NVIDIA support to be much more helpful. I don’t think I’ve had a game actually make this graphics card work hard either, so I suppose its time to downgrade.Umart wouldn’t let me login and their menu system is very hard to navigate now. What a wanted was a “NVIDIA” “not overclocked” “2GB RAM” for “$100-$200” Since two years has passed I thought the 7870 equivalents would be in this price range, but it seems we are waiting on new games still to push the cards.While it is still overclocked unfortunately, I settled on the “$190 MSI GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB” but it has a three year warranty and so I suppose it is more stable than the Radeon Sapphire that it is replacing. I will miss the miniDP connections, but it seems I can still run three monitors over 2xDVI, HDMI.