Jesse...it's time to build.
By rorie 47 Comments
It’s probably been a solid decade since I built a computer. It hasn’t been an everyday occurrence, at any rate: I built one during college and a a micro-ATX for my mom a few years later, and that’s basically been it. I was going to do it again for my last computer, but I wound up founding an aggressively-priced prebuilt system on Newegg and decided to just spring for that rather than take the time to slap all the parts together. So here we are in 2015 and while I didn’t have any major issues with my i7 920 in gaming, I was definitely starting to feel the pinch when it comes to things like lacking USB 3.0/3.1 ports or having a headphone jack on the front of my case that hasn’t worked in four years. So...it was time to build.
I’ve been pondering the build for a while now, and with the recent release of Skylake chips, it felt like the time was right. And before you send me that “It’s not a big enough improvement over last gen!/Next gen will be so much better!” comment, yeah: I know. It feels like that’s been the zeitgeist in the CPU scene over the last year or so that I’ve been looking into them, and I just wasn’t really willing to wait until the next tick or tock or tack or whatever’s on the roadmap. Even more than a new CPU, I really wanted a new mobo and case, so whatever increases are coming down the pipe for CPUs I’m happy to forego in favor of getting this done now.
I already had a decent PSU and a 770GTX in my current machine, and as I mostly play at 1080p still I didn’t feel an immediate need to upgrade the video card. This is what I wound up actually buying for the build:
- Skylake i7-6700k processor
- 16 gigs of DDR4 RAM
- 128 gig M.2 SSD boot drive
- Corsair 750D Performance Tower Case
- Gigabyte LGA1151 Intel Z170 motherboard
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - CPU Cooler
I already had five drives in my current build, including two SSDs, but that little m.2 drive seemed neat enough to warrant spending an extra 110 bucks on it, especially since it meant that I’d be able to install the OS without having to wipe one of my current drives. Those little suckers are neat as boot drives! A dollar a gig isn’t an ideal ratio for a drive at this point, but I don’t regret the splurge.
As far as the actual construction of the thing goes, I absolutely love the case that I got. My last case was a mid-tower and fitting the 770gtx in there was far tighter a squeeze than I would’ve liked, but it slid into the full tower with ease. Clipping the hard drives and SSDs into their little plastic slots in the 750D was easy as hell when I got the hang of it, and it keeps all of the cables out of the main chamber to improve airflow.
The main heart-in-the-throat moment, as always, was attaching the heatsink to the CPU. I had never used a heatsink that required a brace before, and while I ultimately got the Cooler Master cooler on there, the process was more frustrating than it should’ve been, mostly because the instructions were majestically impossible to follow, arriving in some Ikea-inspired, pictures-only form rather than actually having words and such. That might’ve been fine had it not been a modular design intended to install to multiple chipset types, but as it happens I didn’t get very far until I dug up a really handy Youtube vid that was a better guide than the official instructions were, so thanks to this dude I finally got the thing battened down:
After that, though, the RAM and M.2 drive clipped in relatively effortlessly, and I was ready to (try) to boot it. I was porting over the PSU from my old case, but since the Skylake processor has built-in video, I decided to leave my video card alone in the old case just in case anything went wrong.
When the thing posted, I thought that was pretty great! When I started running into errors installing Win7 from a flash drive, I thought that wasn’t pretty great! Apparently the “missing cd/dvd driver” error has been going around for some years, so kudos to MS for never fixing it. I tried a few different flash drives and none of them got past that error (and yes I was trying in a USB 2.0 slot) and looked up a bunch of other solutions.
Anyway, I procured a (legitimate!) Windows 8.1 key from a friend and quickly learned that Windows 8 is a horrible nightmare that should be avoided at all costs. An install from classicshell.net made things a bit better, but I’m itching to get back to Windows 10, which seemed to have some neat recording/streaming tools when I was fooling around with it on my old PC. I’ll probably just buy it at some point and format the C drive again. Easy come, easy go, especially in the era of having everything in The Cloud™. Getting up and running from a fresh install is a lot less taxing than it was in the past, especially since you just point Steam at your old install directory and it'll find all the games without having to re-download them. Had less luck on that point with GOG Galaxy and Witcher 3, which insisted on a complete redownload.
And that’s my story! A quick and relatively easy build aside from the Windows hiccups, all of which are worth dealing with rather than having to deal with some overpriced hunk of junk with an unusable OS from some other company.
Since most games are GPU bound still, I haven’t noticed a crazy improvement in visuals during gaming, but it was interesting reinstalling everything and having the presets redone. MGSV is now fine with pretty much everything turned all the way up, including VSync, while Dying Light is...still kind of a mess. I may bump it up to a 970 at some point in the next couple of months, which I figure should be overkill for playing at 1080p on my TV with an occasional foray into 4k gaming on my monitor for the next couple of years, but maybe I’ll just wait until the next new video card thing to come along and struggle along with 60 fps instead of 80 or whatever.
So, TL;DR: I really like the Corsair case that I got, and computer building can be fun if you have a bunch of money and a spare evening. Try it with your friend, or your mom!
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