I have been beating the shit out of my poor old Asus 260M GTX-based dual core system for the last 4-5 years or something now. The first 3-4 years were actually pretty good, but over the last one, games have really started to give it a bit more than it is prepared to handle.
I was going to go for another laptop that would be equivalent to what this was back when i bought it as a $600 refurb deal. At that point it was solidly an upper middle level machine, there were really only the single gpu 280m laptops and the earliest core2quad chips above its spec then.
Well, nowadays, the balance has shifted in favor of desktops for bang/buck, as a modern equivalent(i.e adjusted for hardware/software inflation) laptop spec is now properly above $2200 for the most part.
So, i decided to build a desktop instead. Pretty much had to go from scratch, as even my old cases are ill-equipped for modern fan solutions and whatnot.
Went for this:
Asus Z87 board(was REAL cheap as a refurb/open box because apparently kids are too lazy to find out what it takes to run the new Haswell Refresh CPUs on them(it wasn't hard))
Intel i5 4690K
16GB RAM
750w Gold Antec PSU(slightly excessive for the build, but it was on the cheaps when i got it)
240GB Crucial SSD for a fresh install of Win7
A few terrabytes of 7200rpm mechanical drives
Zotac GTX970(another bang-for-buck choice. not much else out there for $330 that can run with it, or near it)
28" 1080p Asus minotaur.
Finally bought the aluminum Lian Li case that i decided NOT to spring for back in 1998 when i built my very first desktop system from scratch. It is nice, light and definitely seems to run cool.
Conclusions after a couple weeks of running it.
Fucking thing is awesome. I have just been working my way through all of the games i have been collecting lately but not having the time or hardware to really play through. Went back a bit to play the Metro ones with everything cranked just as a sort of comparative baseline. Then Far Cry 3(one of the ones that started to give the 260M some guff), Far Cry 4(free with the video card), Crysis 1+2, Wolfenstein New Order... Shit, really just everything i have hit it with, it completely destroys. I am certainly not used to having a system that doesn't even need to cycle the fans up to do the types of shit that this thing does to modern games.
It is also WAYYYYY more quiet than i expected. I went for a big-ass air cooler with a bigger/slower fan, and some large-ish Corsair "silent" fans for the case. In conjunction with all the aluminum in the lian Li, and the lowish power consumption of the 4690K and of the little maxwell architecture Zotac, even mildly OC'ed(haven't even begun to really play with that yet at all) it stays way quiet, like not far off the noise level that my laptop makes(which is probably pretty noisy for a laptop because of the heat generation of the Core2Duo and GTX260M in it, but stil generally much much quieter than what i generally expect of a desktop system). Recording will be the real test for this though. Slowly working my way towards having everything installed that i need to run that shit though. At a certain point in a new build one just gets tired of putting all of the pieces back into the OS to do all of the things you have been doing with your old computer. Also, video games are properly distracting.
Good times in general though. I cannot wait to see how the CPU and RAM do with mixing, in particular. I am hoping to be able to get away with an awful lot less temporary track rendering bodging to get bigger mixes together. And i am hoping to be able to do away with the expected mismatch between what the real-time playback and proper offline rendered sound of those sorts of mixes will actually be. It is kind of annoying to have to keep remembering that just because it SOUNDS like the mix is playing in real time, it may not actually be 100% what is going on, fx/compression/etc-wise. It will be interesting to see how that goes.
