Phase Two

Sticking with the same system that I ended up with I carried on with further upgrades

The refresh

Now, the AsRock motherboard was worth somewhere around £50 and it was not the best. I was also still using the free Gigabyte PSU that was involved in the smoking incident, so now that I’ve gotten started, it was clear some things nereded to change. So while keeping the same space-heating AMD FX 4300 CPU, I made a new list to upgrade most of the computer - including the motherboard - which can raise ther question whether this is the same computer as originally built or not. The upgrades that happened at the end of 2016/start of 2017 are:

• Case: Corsair Carbide 100R (window)
• Motherboard: Asus 970 PRO GAMING/AURA ATX Motherboard
• GPU: Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 1050Ti WF2 OC
• ODD 2: ASUS BC-12D2HT (BR-R/DVD-RW drive)
• RAM: Corsair 8GB DDR3 (to make up 16GB of memory)
• PSU:

The components in the computer are now (for the time) looking somewhat more respectable. I got sick of the motherboard not having features or the expandability that I needed, so that was going to go eventually (it had a PCI slot in it to be fair). The Aerocool case was mostly chosen for it being cheap enough at the time, but it was so awkward to use and clean properly. Dust built up frequently in the ‘X’ portion of the case, for example. The upgrade went off without too many problems, although one of the feet of the case was damaged, so that case always had a rock to it.

This phase is mostly a stepping stone to better things, but I also made an upgrade to a better GPU in this phasen at the start of 2018 (this would be GPU number four, someone needed to stop me)

• GPU: Gigabyte GTX 1060 G1 6GB OC

Now don’t panic, there’ll not be a 5th GPU for some time; I was actually very happy with this GPU for 2018-era 1080p gaming at good/great quality. Of course, this depends on the game you play.