Tuesday, February 25, 2014

My Personal PC Build, Part 4

Well it's been a while but I've finally got a new case and bigger hard drive for my main PC. Hard drive wise I got a 1TB 3.5" Seagate 7200rpm SATA hard drive so I finally don't have to worry about hard drive usage any more. As for the case I got a CoolerMaster silencio 352. A very nice Micro ATX case that fits all the hardware in it that I want and has a bit of room for upgrades. Here it is:

Looks good doesn't it?
And some pictures of the interior.

Excuse the cables as this case doesn't have much in the way of cable management on the other side as you will see in the next picture.

As you can see you can get away with thin cables but anything thicker than the 4 pin CPU power cable won't fit as there is a lip at the bottom of the motherboard tray.
The rear of it. All fairly standard.

Finally an overall shot.
So now that I've finally got a decent case and a bigger hard drive the next things I want to upgrade are the motherboard and CPU as I could do with a bit more CPU performance and the best way for me to do that is to move up to a newer generation Intel socket and processor. I could also do with a bit more RAM as I only have 4GB but it's gotten ridiculously expensive (8GB for around £60 to £70 quid. I got my 4GB for around £15 quid.) so yeah I'm going to wait and see if it does come down to a reasonable price.

The other major upgrade I want to do is the graphics card. I've been thinking about the most cost effective way of upgrading to a better graphics card however as I only have a 400W PSU it does limit what you can use a bit. As anything higher than my GTX 650 would really require a better PSU which would cost around the £40 to £50 quid mark for a decent one which is a lot when you add that on top of a new graphics card so I was a bit stumped until I heard that the new Nvidia GTX 750 TI would only use about the same amount of power as my GTX 650 but have quite a bit more performance compared to my GTX 650 so currently that is the graphics card I'm aiming for.

And that wraps up this post. Hopefully I can post a bit more regularly instead of every 3 or 4 months. You never know I guess...