It's "New PC" Time

Hello fellow VR and technology enthusiasts,

3 months ago I upgraded from my old Geforce GTX 970 to a Geforce GTX 1070ti, which (as you may expect) made a tremendous improvement to my Fallout 4 VR experience. It went from being totally playable after a number of tweaks to being a world with much more detail, less pixellation *and* much better frame rates (a.k.a. less reprojection).

However, ever since then (even from before really) I've been hankering to upgrade the rest of my PC as well. I bought my current gaming PC in September 2014 so it's been around for 3.5 years and now on it's third graphics card. So much like my gaming PC before it, it has lived a really useful life of playing the latest games with good levels of detail, which is especially good as before now, my price target for PC components was, I'd say, the "bang-for-buck enthusiast". I'd look for parts that were in between mainstream gaming parts but pushing slightly towards the enthusiast end of the market.

The History of My Current PC

So for reference, the main components making up my current PC are (with the price I paid):

• Processor: Intel i5-4590 (£148)
• Processor Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro rev 2 (£14)
• Motherboard: Asus Z87-K (£94)
• Memory: HyperX 2x8GB 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 (£119)
• Primary Storage: Samsung EVO 840 500Mb (£178)
• Secondary Storage: Seagate SSHD 2TB (£77)
• PSU: XFX 750W XXX Edition Modular PSU (£63) 

I won't bother listing the more minor parts like the case, optical drive, etc because they are largely inconsequential to performance. Also, I re-used my SoundBlaster X-Fi Gamer (can't even remember when I bought that or what I paid) which will get re-used again.

The graphics card history of my current PC is:

The Radeon R9 280X was a disaster for me

• Asus R9 280X DirectCU II 3GB (£233, bought September 2014 with the rest of my current PC) - This was my first foray into buying Radeon instead of nVidia, based on getting better bang for buck, and it was a disaster. The 280X and 290X designs had fundamental stability issues that meant wide swathes of buyers were finding they were getting serious random graphical corruption. For me, I would get random manifestation of bad drawing errors that could only be solved by rebooting the PC, it might happen after 2 hours of playing or 5 minutes. You can see what I'm talking about on this page. I sent it back to eBuyer once and they "tested" it and said they couldn't recreate the issue. I was very annoyed at that, I kept the card for another couple of months trying workarounds to solve the issue, and finally sent it back again and told eBuyer if they didn't sort out the problem I'd never buy from them again. eBuyer refunded me the full amount, which I was grateful for because it totally worked in my favour. The graphics card market had moved on a year and I put a bit of extra money into buying....
• Asus GeForce GTX 970 Strix (£288, bought July 2015) - with this purchase I went back to familiar territory, much better performance and ZERO issues. Luckily for me, I bought this card in July 2015, way before I had any real interest in VR, and it just happened to be the recommended entry specification for a good VR experience, which it totally was. However, a few months after getting my Vive I upgraded to...
• Asus Turbo Geforce GTX 1070ti  (£420, bought December 2017). In a world where graphics cards prices are pushed up by cryptocurrency miners exhausting supply, I managed to buy this shortly after it was released and am I glad I did. The same card will now set you back an additional £200 just a few months later.

So my current setup has a fantastic graphics capability in the 1070ti, but the core of my PC is still 3.5 years old, and a fairly mid-level spec when I bought it. I just can't get over the feelings of how slower memory and CPU may be hampering my VR experiences, so I am finally biting the bullet and upgrading.

Making Decisions on New PC Parts

Really, up to the time I bought my current PC, my decisions on what specification components to get has always been to try and buy a new PC in the £800 to £1000 price range, which historically has meant a gaming PC that will stand the test of time aided with graphics cards upgrades down the line. My current PC has lasted 3.5 years and my previous PC lasted 5 years! (when I was less well off than I am now).

Well, I didn't really mean for it to end up this way, but actually my new PC parts are, I would say "top-end mainstream enthusiast". In other words, I'm basically buying the best components you can get without paying silly money.

Also, unlike previous builds, I won't be building an entirely new PC. I will be re-using the following components from my old PC:

• Case
• PSU
• Optical drive
• Primary storage (which will become second-level primary storage. I'll explain in a bit).
• Secondary storage (which will become second-level secondary storage).
• Sound card

Why the change, when I've built entirely new PCs before? The reasons are:

• In the past I've sold my old PC builds super cheap to family members, but none of them seem to have a use for my existing PC.
• You don't really retain any money in keeping the old PC intact. In fact, some quick research tells me I can sell the components individually on eBay for more money overall.
• Ultimately, the lowest net-spend way to get myself a new PC was to do it this way. Which is just as well really....

... because I ended up lulling myself into a false sense of security when it came to managing costs. My intention was to buy a new spec for around the £600 to £800 (so basically the same range of old, minus the cost of the parts I was re-using). However, I ended up really going for the parts this time and ended up spending the same as I always did without draining the £200 on parts inconsequential to performance.

The New Parts I Ordered

Okay, here's the guts of what my new PC is made up of and why I picked each part.

Processor - Intel i7-8700K (£301)

So, right off the bat, you can see this is not the i5 similar spec to my old PC, but essentially the best processor you can buy before you go into silly money i9 territory.

I did look at an i5 processor, the i5-8600K, which at £222 initially looked quite appealing price wise against the i7-8700k I initially saw at £327. However, to be honest I never really entertained settling for the i5 this time, a decision I feel was further vindicated when I managed to order the i7 for £301, so I only ended up spending £79 pound extra to get all the extra performence from higher clock speed, more cache and 6 additional hyper-threading virtual cores.

Processor Cooler - Be Quiet BK019 Dark Rock Pro3 (£57)

It's just a cooler, right? I spent £14 last time on a fairly basic cooler. And the only reason I bought that rather than use the stock cooler was because I wanted something quieter.

But my old processor was an i5 that couldn't really be overclocked. My new processor is a top-end 8700K that can be overclocked. I probably won't bother to do any overclocking initially, but down the line I am sure I am going to play with it. And here we fall into why I ended up spending more money than I originally intended. I thought, "If I'm buying these great components that can be overclocked, it seems silly to hamper that ability with other cheaper components".

And looking at the more enthusiast cooler section of the market, you can pay silly money (up to and even over £100) on air coolers and even more on water-based coolers.

I'm not interested in water-based coolers, too much faff and actually I am not really for the idea of putting water inside my expensive new PC. The Be Quiet fan was very well priced against competitors, has excellent cooling perfomance for an air cooler and is very very quiet for a higher-end performing air cooler.

I've gone from spending £14 on a CPU cooler last time round to £57 this time, whoops.

Motherboard  - Asus TUF Z370-Pro Gaming £141

As you might have worked out, I am an ASUS enthusiast. Aside from the Radeon, which I blame AMD for because the problem is the basic design, not the manufacturing, I have never gone wrong buying ASUS. Excellent quality production, generally top-end performance and for reasonable prices.

So I was always going to buy another ASUS motherboard. With the Z370 chipset needed for the i7-8700K, there's not the usual massive range of ASUS motherboards to pick from.

Actually my motherboard requirements are generally quite low. I need a standard size motherboard, onboard wired LAN (fairly standard), I don't care about onboard wifi because I used wired, I don't care about onboard audio because my Soundblaster card is still fully supported gaming-wise, I don't care about onboard graphics (ha ha, VR with onboard graphics) and I don't care about looks (my PC case doesn't have a window) so in the end I picked the fairly modest TUF Pro out of the range available.

It still cost £141 though, almost twice as much as my last ASUS motherboard, whoops again! But I think the money is going into the Z370 chipset and the wide range of overclocking options.

Memory - G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series F4-3200C14D-16GVK 2x8GB (£253).

This is probably the component I feel most unsure about. I've spent extra on getting high speed low latency RAM.

I went for 3200MHz RAM because various recommendations I've seen about what memory to get for an i7-8700K basically says get the 3000MHz or 3200MHz speeds if you can afford it, but don't spend more because you get diminishing returns.

I also went for low latency RAM, CL16 is the standard and I've bought CL14, because I know CAS Latency can be a key differentiation between cheap RAM at a certain speed and better performing RAM. Actually, buying 3200MHz at lower than CL16 doesn't seem to give you many reasonably priced options looking at the likes of eBuyer and Amazon, so when I saw this memory at this price it stood out.

Finally, I stick to buying Qualified Vendor List (QVL) memory these days to eliminate the risk of incompatibilities and having to send components back and waiting even longer to finish building the new PC.

However, having decided all the above, it is very hard to find benchmarks that really back up the extra performance I am hoping to get out of buying this RAM, so I think a future blog post is going to be dedicated to testing this out.

I've gone from spending £119 on 16GB memory last time round to more than twice as much this time. Whoops again.

Primary Storage - Samsung 850 EVO M.2 (£154)

Aside from the form factor, this is a straight jump to the next generation over my existing SSD drive.

I considered keeping my existing 840 EVO as primary storage but, once again, thought that if I'm buying these quality components, why chain them to yesteryear's parts.

Samsung stand out in the SSD market due to the type of chips they produce, you don't get similar performance for similar prices anywhere else, so it was an easy decision to get the 850 EVO.

The other difference of the 850 to my old 840 is that the 850 EVO is the M.2 form factor. I never heard of it before researching my PC parts this time round, but my new ASUS motherboard has an M.2 slot so I thought "Why not?"

So now I can explain what I meant by "second level primary storage" above. My existing 840 EVO is still a great drive, just not as great as the 850 EVO will be, so the 850 will be my primary system drive that I'll also install the latest games on, and the 840 will become my D drive where I keep things I still want to run fast, but don't need the absolute best performance. So I'll probably install most of my applications on the 840.

Secondary Storage - Toshiba P300 3TB.

I have no requirements from my secondary storage except I need a bigger drive. My existing secondary drive is a 2TB SSHD from Seagate. The hybrid SSHD components ended up completely inconsequential in my old PC build, but I am running out of space on it, so I've literally just gone for space this time, hence the conventional P300 HDD.

The 3TB drive will become my main secondary storage, where I'll put things like my music and movie collections, and the older 2TB drive will just become an add-on volume just to dump files or use to backup other spaces.

Reusing Parts

I considered whether to buy a new PSU, but my existing XFX PSU is powerful enough at 750W, efficient enough, has good fans on it and is totally modular already, so I literally have no need to buy anything else.

I'm not a person who likes a flashy PC case. I've been building my own PCs for 20-ish years and I'm old-school like that. Plus, I quite like my existing case (a Coolermaster N300 case).

I really only have an Optical drive for DVDs and Blu Rays I buy so I can watch them on my iPad or home network, so no need to replace my existing one.

My SoundBlaster X-Fi Gamer sound card is pretty old school, but it is still fully supported and the sound processing is probably still better than even today's onboard sound solutions. This matters to be because I also have a Creative 5.1 speaker system that combines well with the card. So I'm keeping it.

I did consider whether to sell my old drive parts, but I think I'll get better value out of them than how much I'll get if I sell them second hand.

Conclusion

So there we are, my thoughts and the process I went through when selecting new PC parts. At the time of writing, all of the parts are delivered now except the memory, which is shipping from Germany. My next blog post will be about building the PC.