Looking at the inside of my office you probably would not believe it but of all the laptops in various states of repair laying about – none of them is actually mine. All the laptops, devices and even my phone are actually Great Expectations’. So it was high time to rectify that and get ready for some good winter time gaming with my darlin wife Elizabeth. Yes… I know you are amazed – my wife games. Yes I am a very lucky guy.
So my goal for this build was a solid, snappy gaming platform for moderately advanced graphics that would not break the bank. Here are the parts I came up with after many many cycles of filling and dumping my cart on Tigerdirect. (Hey do not judge me – if yer a geek you know exactly what this process entails :P) Seriously this part took me forever – mainly equivocating with myself over price and performance issues. Sigh… it can be very very hard to spend anything when you know it is really just for you when you are at my stage of life.
Processor – AMD 8350 Black – 8 cores 4.0ghz
Motherboard – MSI 970 Gaming
Graphics – MSI 960GTX
RAM – 16Gb PCI 2133 DDR3
HDD – 480Gb SSD/1TB 7200rpm Seagate
ODD – Asus DVDR
PS – Modular 850watt
Case – Fractal Design ATX mid-tower
Network – TPI Wireless card
Long story short this dude is snappy and runs Rift on ultra just fine. This is my first build with a SSD and wow – the boot time is crazy quick. We like the social type games – MMORPGs and these generally are not gonna wrench your graphics card inside out or need every ounce of speed you can squeeze from your processor so I am running the stock AMD cooler along with the three (very quiet I might add) case fans and have no cooling issues so far.
Of course once I assembled everything – it did not work. The power supply was DOA. Actually if I ever built a computer and it just worked the very first time I hit the switch I probably would worry from that point on that something was not quite right heh… Anyhoo Tiger got me out a new one and all was well. By the way – modular power supplies rock! If you do not know what I am talking about these have all the power cables separate and you just attach the ones that you need – unlike the old power supplies you are not left with a huge wad of unused cables to stuff in the case at the end. I am not a big case modder as I do not cart mine around and it gets stuffed under a desk but a minimum of cables not only helps the cooling – it just looks nice and neat and will no doubt make my life easier next time I have to dive in to fix or upgrade. If you are concerned with the aesthetics you will not be disappointed if you use this motherboard and video card combo – they match and are quite sexy. The MSI and dragon logo on the side of the graphics card lights up when the system is on.
All in all am very happy with it and think I will be getting years of service out of this rig. In the end I have to admit I just really love building systems – I hope computers never actually reach “toaster” status 😉