Specs

The Build

Money – The first round of parts arrive.

After 2 days, for prime shipping, the first batch of parts had arrived on Monday.

At this point- I have all of the required parts to build the Budget Gaming PC. However- I need to wait on my new case to arrive before I start building PCs…. Because, My old MOBO/CPU/RAM will be transitioned to the budget PC, while the new CPU/MOBO/RAM will be placed into the new case. I will need to wait until Friday, so that I am not handling the parts more then I need to.

Friday – Build Day

I received this Thursday..

So, due to a train derailment, the full build won’t be completed today… however, I did get the combination put together. Let’s get started..

First I pulled the old dusty combo out of the corner. Since I will be reusing most of its components in the budget build, I used a bit of duster to remove dust.

First step, was to start removing the old components.

You may notice I have a lot of large hard disks mounted, with 4 more in a front mount hot swap dock. I will not be using them for the new build. They were apart of my old legacy NAS. Nowadays, you can pretty much buy a single disk with more capacity then my entire 8x 2TB NAS had (8×2 = 12 TB usable after raid ZFS Z-2, ie, 2 parity drives)

Time to start opening boxes.

More porn shots.



Now that the components have been added to their temporary home… let’s get it turned on.

Uh oh….

So, I went through a quick bios setup, and started to boot into windows.

After 4 or 5 reboots, it was finally time to get logged in!

Just kidding. Blue screen of death.

… A few hours later, after getting all of the drivers installed and updated, and cloning my old SATA SSDs over to my new M.2 970 evos, its time to run some benchmarks!

New Case

At long last- the box containing the new case did successfully arrive. Despite the appearance of the box, there was no damage done to the case.

Wiring management.

Almost completed…

Completed Product

Here is a small gallery of the completed product. The RGB lighting is controlled by the motherboard. MSI Mystic Light

Lastly, here is a short video of the case and lighting.

Lastly- A completed image, while playing a bit of Far Cry. The lighting color is determined by current CPU temp. Green = cold. Blue = good. Red = Getting toasty.

The completed product.

Benchmarks

As promised, here are a few simple benchmarks from my PC upgrade. I will be doing mostly real-world benchmarks, including Fry cry, Crystal Benchmark, Avg power consumption at the wall, and time to boot .

I believe these simple real-world benchmarks should show the difference in user experience that I will see, personally.

Disclaimer- None of these benchmarks were performed in a “clean room” environment. They were performed in the exact same context as if I were performing the tasks. No background processes were disabled. Chrome tabs were open. Real world benchmark!

** note- time to boot, and power consumption were removed, due to inconclusive or inaccurate results. To note- time to boot and power consumption appear to be roughly the same, from the inaccurate tests performed.

A last minute note- during the CPU / Memory stress tests, with the Hyper 212, temperatures never rose above 64c, even after 30 minutes of continuous 100% utilization. As well, with the entire rig sitting one foot away from my chair- It is very quiet, even under full load. Fractal Design did a great job on the case.

Farcry New Dawn – Max Settings 1080

This test is pretty self explanatory. Ultra settings @ 1920×1080

Min FPS Avg FPS Max FPS Old Build 42 75 120 New Build 55 84 137 After Ram Speed 65 101 143 % Improvement 42% 28% 17%

Results- Pretty decent improvements across the board, far more then I expected to achieve.

To note- I did notice my 3600mhz RAM was not running at 3,600mhz. I updated the settings in the BIOS and returned to run another benchmark. The difference was nearly as big as the difference between the old cpu and the new.

Crystal Benchmark

Here are the benchmarks for my old SSD. The Seagate hosts my OS, and the Crucial hosts my steam library. Nothing impressive to see….. Not for 2019 at least.

Old OS Drive Seagate 600 240GB SATA ST240HM000 New OS Drive Samsung 970 EVO 500GB M.2 NVMe Old Gaming Drive Crucial BX200 480GB SATA CT480BX200SSD1 New Gaming Drive Samsung 970 EVO 500GB M.2 NVMe

Overall- HUGE gains for sequential performance. On average, huge gains across the board. This should speed up quite a few programs and games.

User Benchmark

Take the results of these benchmarks as you want. I did include them as a generic benchmark run.

Old Build Results: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/20730464

Initial Test – https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/20855176

After properly setting RAM speed: https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/20855404

Lastly- Benchmarks after Correcting an issue with user benchmark:

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/20874159

Summary- I do give user benchmark credit for telling me that my RAM was running at half of its recommended clock speed- and for reminding me to disable compression for my SSD.

Edit-

The final benchmark after a mild OC.

https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/20983039

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