My PC Building Experience
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I remember as if it was yesterday, when I owned an internet/gaming club, years ago - and mixing up stuff like Bartons 2000 & 2500+ the best AMD's CPU's before INTEL kicked their asses with Core2Duos, mixing them with cheap-at-that-time VIA KT 400 boards (ASUS A7V8X-X, and having frustrating problems with the mobo/cpu/ati radeon 9600 - like VPU recover error message). At the time I was getting into the whole building PCs world, and was told that it would work. Trying to run Vice City at other 10 PCs with nVIDIA GeFORCE MX440... Ahh those times....
From back then, I've switched few PCs (at my home), starting in 2006. with nForce2 ASUS mobo/Athlon 2500+/1 GB of DDR SDRAM, then in 2008 going to Gigabyte p35/Intel C2D E8500/radeon 3850/4Gigs of DDR2, then switching those with the CPU with E8600/radeon 4870/8Gigs of DDR2, then in 2010. I got myself the RADEON 6870 from POWERCOLOR, and finally in autumn of 2014 I bought myself the mighty SAPPHIRE R9 280x... all on the same p35/c2d platform... Sometimes with the purchase of r9 280x, I had to get myself a tT PSU SMART SE 630W, which serves me till this very day... an excellent low-price power supply.
And recently, a week or two back, the mobo/cpu/ram upgrade became a reality.
It took me almost 2 weeks of researches, compromises, reading tons of pages of PC builder's guides, if it is worth to go for Skylake, or Devil's Canyon or Sandy Bridge...
I finally am settled with Intel Core i5-2500k (4.2GHz with TB and slight overclock), ASUS P8Z77-M (really amazing board for its price point) and an 8GB of preclocked Fury Hyper-X DDR3 RAM (1866Mhz) - all of which I paid only 260$ for (in Bosnia), getting a warranty of 2y for mobo and ram and 1y for CPU
The change is mindblowing. The FPS with this combo is crazy. Paired with 850EVO 250GB Samsung it blew my friends' minds. Thank you tech support forums, thanks TechSpot, thanks to my bro who helped me with a build
Till next upgrade
Happy holidays and future PC builds to all of you fellow hardware guys.