A Death In The Family

The One That Was

She had been part of the family since 2010, I'd built her from scratch. Every component I'd chosen after extensive research and I was confident that I'd have a fast PC for at least 3 years. She had a corsair 80GB SSD that had cost me more than the graphics card, the graphics card was the latest top line AMD card (5970). 

The case was a first for me (and my supplier) instead of having the cables at the rear the motherboard was rotated 90 degrees so the cables came out the top. On the underside were three large fans that helped keep it cool.

The PC was designed to run multiple EVE clients at once and thanks to three monitors I could run ten clients easily without any noticeable lag, not to mention just about any game at high resolution. 

The End

I went to bed the Friday night not knowing the next day she would not wake up. Nothing untoward or indicative of what was to come had happened during the day or evening before.

Attempting to power up the next morning resulted in her appearing to start, the power light was on but no signal was transmitted to the monitors and I could not hear the normal start up noises of the non-SSD hard drives.

Investigation showed that there was an issue with both the graphics card and motherboard. A friend thought that the motherboard PCI-Express slot was most probably the cause of the death and that I would have to salvage what I could.

The One That Will Be

I needed a new PC, data was mostly backed up and the only stuff I needed to get off the hard drives I had could be extracted via a USB dock. Buying a new PC was not something I wanted to do, being unemployed meant I was being careful with money but luck reared its head and a nice tax refund this year gave me a decent budget and selling the bits that still worked raised that further.

Here is the new PC.

A Core i7-4790 @ 3.6Ghz, 32GB RAM and a Nvidia GTX 960 form the basis of this small beast. A 240GB SSD provides the home for Windows 10 with a 3Tb Seagate drive for data. She's small, fast and pretty.

The Cosrsair case is not what I would normally have gone for but I don't need a 20kg monster case any more, the smaller case fits nicely under my desk and is easy to access if I need to get instead to add/remove components in the future.

Data has already been transferred over, Windows 10 is very usable and the return of the Start Menu welcome. EVE runs very fast and even other games I play (World of Warships/Payday 2) are blisteringly fast.

I paid more than I wanted to but if I can get another 5 years out of this PC then it will have been worth every cent.

I guess I have no excuse for not posting blog posts now, time to edit those drafts I have had waiting for work for too long....