New personal gamestation!

Beside a new devbox that I talked about setting up, now that I no longer pay for the tinderbox I also decided to buy myself a new PC for playing games (so Windows-bound, unfortunately), replacing Yamato that has been serving me well for years at this point.

Given we’ve talked about this at the office as well, I’ll write down the specs over here, with the links to Amazon (where I bought the components), as I know a fair number of people are always interested to know specs. I will probably write down some reviews on Amazon itself as well as on the blog, for the components that can be discussed “standalone”.

• CPU: Intel i7 5930K, hex-core Haswell-E; it was intended as a good compromise between high performance and price, not only for gaming but also for Adobe Lightroom.
• Motherboard: Asus X99-S
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix 32GB (8GBx4) actually this one I ordered from Crucial directly, because the one I originally ordered on Amazon UK was going to ship from Las Vegas, which meant I had to pay customs on it. I am still waiting for that one to be fully cancelled, but then Crucial was able to deliver an order placed on Wednesday at 10pm by Friday, which was pretty good (given that this is a long weekend in Ireland.)
• Case: Fractal Design Define R5 upon suggestion of two colleagues, one who only saw it in reviews, the other actually having the previous version. It is eerily quiet and very well organized; it would also fit a huge amount of storage if I needed to build a new NAS rather than a desktop PC.
• CPU cooler: NZXT Kraken X61 I went with water cooling for the CPU because I did not like the size of the copper fins in the other alternatives of suggested coolers for the chosen CPU. Since this is a completely sealed system it didn’t feel too bad. The only shaky part is that the only proper space for this to fit into the case is on the top-front side, and it does require forcing the last insulation panel in a little bit.

Now you probably notices some parts missing; the reason is that I have bought a bunch of components to upgrade Yamato over the past year and a half since being employed also means being able to just scratch your itch for power more easily, especially if you, like me, are single and not planning a future as a stock player. Some of the updates are still pretty good and others are a bit below average now, and barely average when I bought it, but I think it might be worth listing them still.

• SSD: Samsung 850 EVO and Crucial M550, both 1TB. The reason for having two different ones is because the latter (which was the first of the two) was not available when I decided to get a second one, and the reason to get a second one was because I realized that while keeping pictures on the SSD helped a lot, the rest of the OS was still too slow…
• GPU: Asus GeForce GTX660 because I needed something good that didn’t cost too much at the time.
• PSU: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 1200W which I had to replace when I bought the graphics card, as the one I had before didn’t have the right PCI-E power connectors, or rather it had one too few. Given that Yamato is a Dual-Quad Opteron, with registered ECC memory, I needed something that would at least take 1kW; I’m not sure how much it’s consuming right now to be honest.

We’ll see how it fares once I have it fully installed and started playing games on it, I guess.