We have to go back a bit, to last summer when I got my GTX 480, I was amazed at that thing, surprisingly powerful for what it was, I could still run things I wanted to run at relatively decent settings without affecting performance too much to be noticable, I had been joking to myself about the current state of intels security, and that what if every PC after 2010 stopped working, what would be the best you could realistically get? Some of my original decisions were to get a Phenom II X6 based system, however 1100T Phenom IIs are surprisingly expensive, not to mention that they don't have multi-threading, though their performance is slightly better, the higher price for the chips really didn't sell it to me, even though I'm a bit of an AMD fanboy. I had first decided upon something like a 920, however after hearing from ben that one of his favored weather systems had a 930, I decided that I may actually want to step it up a bit, and go for a 950 , I was actually thinking of going for a 960 for a short period of time, knowing that it was slightly more powerful... But I decided that I should go with the 950. Originally, I got a 920 just to test out what the cheapest x58 based i7 could do for the time and I was pleasently surprised, however I wanted the 950 so that is what I ended up with.
I was browsing eBay as I usually do, doing my normal sort of search for cheap Trinitrons, decent RAM and other stuff, I came across an antec 1200 (not in the best shape, but none of the plastic was broken or anything) that was for bidding, I waited until the last day to bid, honestly I thought that I would not be successful, but as it turns out the other person bidding must have realized that it was collection only and gave up near instantly, I managed to get the thing for $12.50, which for a case that I had seen go for upwards of $100 I think that was a pretty good deal, luckily the seller was nice enough to agree to post it for me (and that was less than $20, which was okay and I got it only a short while later. I knew that it needed some work, I has seen that the front drive covers were in really poor shape, so I rummaged through my dads garage and found a nearly empty can of matte black spray paint, perfect... though I nearly poisoned myself after doing the painting in the basement. it turned out to be pretty decent though I know i could have done better. One of the other things that I needed to do was clean the acrylic side panel, it looked as if someone had spilt some water-cooling fluid onto it at some point, and since acrylic isn't that great for resisting chemicals, there were visible runs of something on the side panel, sos I took "The 8bit guy's" advice and used some baking soda as a light abrasive to get the streaks off... it sorta worked but wasn't great, not to mention that there was then baking soda everywhere and damn there is a lot of effort involved with doing that.
The RAM wasn't much of a story but after I got the motherboard I knew that I needed some RAM to test it out, now before then I had never even seen in person what DDR3 was, sure I had seen pretty much everything from PC66 to DDR4, just not DDR3, so I knew that was something that I had to get, at first I was thinking of getting a 1GB stick of 1333MHz on ebay, however after five seconds I decided that instead I would go looking for something a little more premium, unfortunately anything with a heatspreader on eBay was going for more than $20 (which was definitely not worth it) so I decided upon going to the local computer place in the town just over. I went out on my bike, though because I didn't know which times the PC shop was open I arrived late and it was closed, I still went to get fuel so the trip wasn't completely wasted... The next day I was back at college (situated in the same town) and during my lunch break I went out with my friend James to go to the shop (it wa just me and James, Kian didn't really want to go). We walked through town to the shop and managed to score a quite nice kit of 3x2GB 1600Mhz corsair XMS3 DDR3 for $5, which was deal that I thought was what it realistically should have cost (Take that ebay scumbags and your $25 off brand memory). All of the dimms worked just fine, I didn't really have any issues with them, but I'd really like to get some more of the same sort of stuff... However people on ebay really don't know what things are actually worth.
| CPU | GPU | RAM | Motherboard | Storage | Case | PSU |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intel Core i7 950 | NVidia GeForce GTX 480 1.5GB | 3 x 2GB DDR3 1600MHz Corsair XMS3 | Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD5 - X58 Chipset | N/A | Antec 1200 Full-Tower | N/A |