Hardware Upgrade
The last upgrade to my main PC was about 4 and a half years ago. The hardware was holding up surprisingly well (still allowing my to play recent games like Fallout 4, albeit at a lower frame rate). However, I'm a fan of the Battlefield series and their most recent release looked too nice to not play it.
I initially only bought a new GPU and that was good enough to generally play Battlefield. But the experience wasn't great. The CPU clearly became the bottleneck. And since upgrading the CPU also meant a new mainboard and a new mainboard meant new RAM, I ended up buying a lot of new hardware.
So here's what I'm running now:
- Intel Core i5-6600k CPU 240€
- Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU cooler 35€
- MSI 170-A Pro Mainboard 110€
- G.Skill Ripjaws F4-2400C15D-16GVR 16GB DDR4 Ram 102€
- GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1060 6GB GPU 285€
- Crucial M4-CT256M4SSD2 250GB SSD holding my Linux system
- Crucial CT500MX2 500GB SSD holding my Windows system and games
- be quiet! Straight Power 580W power supply with cable management
- Roccat Ryos MK Pro mechanical keyboard
- Roccat Kova gaming mouse 40€
As you can see, I opted for upper mid-range instead of a hardcore gaming rig. Not all of the hardware was bought this time. Some of the components I have for a while now. However I'm doing something I've never done before - I'm running the CPU overclocked to 4.1Ghz. It's just a single setting in the bios and the huge cooler easily keeps the temperature down to 45°C even during full load. UserBenchmark seems to like it.
Because my Windows 7 really didn't agree with all the new hardware, I also bought a Windows 10 license (18€). After disabling all the privacy crap that comes with it1), it's quite a nice system.
So after spending 830€, it's nice to see that I still suck at Battlefield .