3 Commando Brigade

Rig upgrade soon. Any thoughts?

So, the time has come for me to get some upgrades and get rid of this pos full tower which I hate so much.

I have made a list of the parts I currently own (listed as £0.00) and parts I want to buy/add/upgrade.

The i5 is a nice CPU and good price range. Beats my old i7 920 for sure. http://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=834&cmp[]=2284

I went for the H97 but I guess it doesn't fully support CPU overclocking like the Z97. Stock on the 4690k is pretty nice anyway.

The 250GB SSD I'm getting just purely for games I want to run. Currently I only use it for ArmA 3 and Battlefront games which takes up about 24GB worth of space. I think it is enough for gaming in general.

The case is the 350D I've been looking at it for quite some time. It is nice and small and appears to have good cable management and installation process. Has a decent amount of fan space when I get some extra cash to upgrade to AF and SP series fans.

Any thoughts on this setup?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (£174.00 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H80i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (£0.00)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H97M-D3H Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£67.84 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£52.68 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 840 Series 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£0.00)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£85.00 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£0.00)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 4GB WINDFORCE Video Card (£0.00)
Case: Corsair 350D MicroATX Mid Tower Case (£75.03 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Corsair RM 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£79.99 @ Amazon UK)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS224-06 DVD/CD Writer (£0.00)
Sound Card: Asus Xonar DX 24-bit 192 KHz Sound Card (£0.00)
Total: £534.54

Edit: My current PSU is http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-Series-Modular-Version-CMPSU-1000HXUK/dp/B001A4WIBO#productDetails does anyone know if this PSU is worth keeping for the new rig. It is old but it is still in working order. I could save £80. I wasn't sure it would fit in the 350D since it is larger than the specs but someone else said he got it in without a problem.

Bin the PSU - wasn't the most reliable model when new...

not worth the risk imo

J

Yeah, I think it might be time. I've had this system for 2009. It is still a nice rig and plays most modern games, even with my old HD5970 inside.

Agree on the MB - OC'ing is just so easy it's a shame to lose the ability.

PSU ?

It's OLD !!  (dry capacitors on a high wattage PSU = nasty smoking CPU's ) and unreliable - those older Corsair units were not that great to start with. Especially with the amount of current that 920 would have been drawing.

For the price he's paying for new stuff he'd be nuts not to change it imo.

PSU's probably have the SHORTEST lifetime of any component in a well used system. Personally I've blown more PSUs than any other component and as they age they seriously knacker a system with weird symptoms that are just impossible to pin down, till you replace the CPU and lo and behold the bugs disappear.

Trust me

I had the watercooler (50i) pretty much since I got the build. I had a really good motherboard back then Asus Rampage II Extreme which obviously came with OC for my i7 920.

I'm not really sure. I would like to have a gigabyte board but I haven't really found one with good reviews for less than £100. Price difference for the ability of easy OC on my CPU which is already running nicely at stock.

Yeah, it might hinder me in future but by the time I probably care my PC will be looking for an upgrade.

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/part/gigabyte-motherboard-gaz97mds3h

That is the only gigabyte one near the price range of the H97. It has similar specs and I don't care about SLI because I won't use it. I haven't really looked around yet to see what else there is since this has all been done on partpicker.

Do you have any suggestions for a board under £100? Also I seen on the wiki for the older series requires some update to work with newer cpus if I remember correctly, the 97 series comes with the support already there.

Yeah I have gone with asus board currently and I haven't had a problem. Gigabyte have good rma though for uk so I would like main things to stick with them.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4971#ov

For the board I selected it says:
Advanced CPU OC allows users to set CPU base clock, frequency, and voltages, and integrated graphics frequency.
Advanced DDR OC allows users to set the memory clock. 

I mean isn't that the only overclocking support I need?

I dunno about the power system thing.

Actually might decide to stick with asus for motherboard after reading about this: http://www.techpowerup.com/202196/asus-enables-overclocking-on-h97-h87-b85-and-h81-series-motherboards.html

Seems to be a better one for the money.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00K80N59U/?tag=pcp0f-21