So I recently decided upon the best way to spend my tax return. I should start by saying that I already own a good 650watt PSU, and a EVGA GeForce GTX960, but they were sitting on a crappy motherboard with a crappy processor in a crappy case, so I figured I'd get them to a new home, a better home. This home:
Thermaltake Versa N21 in white, because it looks cool, but not crazy, and there's room for 5 fans, 1 of which is included. Also plenty of clearance on the bottom for my PSU to breath. I just bought a 4 pack of cheap fans because I really don't care for the whole "LEDs EVERYWHERE" look since I have it in my bedroom.
Then came the next obvious step, choosing a processor. After trying to find a balance between price and performance I decided on this:
Intel i5 6600k 3.5ghz. More than enough for my needs, and should have no problem with basic video recording compared to the garbage AMD chip that accompanied my old PC.
And obviously I couldn't trust the factory heatsink from my old PC, nor would it even fit this motherboard, so I went a little overboard for futureproofing reasons.
Thermaltake Spin-Q, which looks neat, but works incredibly well. About as well as anything less than watercooled can, as far as I can tell.
Once I knew my processor it was time to give it a place to sit, so I searched around for a while before coming to this:
Gigabyte GA-Z170XP. So much room for expansion, and SLI support in case I ever need a second GTX960 to work with. Plus the built in audio is actually really, really good.
And because they were on sale;
2x 8GB 2400mhz DDR4 Ram cards. I figured I probably didn't need to go nuts here as I never even touched the limit on the single 8GB card I had in my old setup. Funny enough, I totally forgot to order these. So I ordered them using Prime hoping to get them the next day. There was a shipping delay and it took just enough time to not grant me a full refund from Amazon. So these two held up my build because none of the local places stock DDR4.
So far I've stress tested it with BeamNG and it performed extremely well with multiple large vehicle collisions in the middle of dense foliage at max settings. Plus I was able to do plenty of off-roading with my favorite mod in the woods without it turning into a slideshow. So yeah, I'd say I'm pretty happy with my first real build.
). I sadly missed out on another 182 example (with considerably more mileage) which had some tasty mods including the the proper Turini for Renaults, which look a smattering better than the normal Turinis. If I decide spend a bit on mods though I'll probably commit sacrilege and go for the more 205-esque SL 434s...
