Time to Upgrade

Well for me it is time to upgrade so what I have been doing is doing a bit of research, and trying to come up with a plan. First off I did what I did before, get caught up with the current market of hardware. This first lead me to see what AMD had came out with most recently. This lead me unto failure, the reason being that the processor called "bulldozer" had came out and it was a bit of a let down. Now between the Flamers and the Non-Committal I finally turned my attention to the other leader, Intel. The reason why I went to AMD before is because when I was building the P.C. that I am on at the moment, I went with a AMD Phenom64 Quad Core. Reason behind this I was getting more power for the price at the time, it has served very well so far and when there was a suspected problem with it (which I found out later it was just in incompetence of come repair man and fixed it myself) I sent it of to AMD who said they couldn't see a problem with it but they would replace the chip just in case. That was amazing customer service, and that is why I wanted to stay with them.
Alas I started researching intel and OMG the stats and raw data that I started reading over was just fantastic. I had made up my mind using the stats from overclock3d which gave a more opinionated review as instead of avoiding there own opinion and committing to something that was going to be on the *dun dun dun* INTERNET. Anyway after looking at that I decided it would have to be a motherboard that can take the newest chipset 1155, and because of the lack of money get the 5i 2500k for now. My friend, weyom, convinced me that overclocking is a lot easier than it seems so I am going for the 2500k@ £167.94 or 2600k@ £242.99 if I have the money. :P.

So next up is the motherboard, so I have been looking a few different types of motherboards and at this point I'm not sure on the matter. The one that I saw a review with the overclock3dwas the asus-p8h67 -Video. Which seemed pretty good. Weyom's recomendation was for the gigabyte-ga-p67a @£104.70.


Now we all know that we can be judged by our cover so it was time for me to pick out some Cases and Monitors. In regards to Cases I needed something that would be able to hold a good few hard disk drives with hopefully easy access. An easy access Audio cables on the front and most importantly I needed one that had a cut-away in the metal to allow for the cooling apparatus that I was to put on it. Weyom pointed me in the right direction with this image.
These were unto the second to last Hurdle, Case1, Case2, Case3, Case4, Case5, Case6, Case7, Case8.
Now I did go through a lot of different ones, as seen above but I had reduced it down to [@} Cases.
Bitfenix £56.49
Bitfenix £46.77
Bitfenix £39.98
& Fractal £51.59
And you can guess which ones I preferred :P. Now I will be buying 2 cases, one for my old P.C. that I will be putting in a good cooling system, upgrading it to windows 7 & getting an o.k. graphics card for. The graphics card will be at a later date but the rest is necessary to let my girlfriend run the virtual servers off.
Now Monitors, I currently have a hand-me-down Samsing SyncMaster 172v which is a beige, VGA connection and smallish monitor. I have now looked at a few and all I seem to want is one with a DVI connector. So there are 2 on my plate that I feel are certainly worth the money. The Hanns-g 21.5" @ £88.99 and the Philips 18.5" @ £62.99. No real decision on that front, want to chat to the girlfriend to get opinions.

Now in regards to coolers I was a bit uneasy at first, with the post "moltile: lol well there was a few coolers that i was looking at because the fact that it is "water cooled" got to be honest, scared me a bit so i haven't looked into it yet." but again with the guidance from my friend weyom pointed out there are 2 different things, water cooling and water pumps. The water pump is the one I wanted, no assembly required apart from sticking it on and no replacing the liquid. The recommendation was to get one like this.

In regards to graphics cards I will not be getting anything new for a while, reason being is that the funds are pretty low and if i need to bottle neck my P.C. it might as well be the part I will probably be upgrading most often. The one that I thought would be a good entry level was the GTX 570 but this may change. I know so far that I haven't mentioned RAM but it is the same respect as the graphics card, I will be upgrading it more often than not.

I thought I would throw this in. It is a Xenta wireless mini keyboard with a touchpad. The first thing that poped into my head was. Ohhh that's an interesting keyboard, it could be used on my ps3 etc. I wonder if that would work, wooooop :P. This is Weyoms P.C. Spec. & Windows 7 ultimate 64 bit.