15 March, 2016

quad-g5

Because of a recent lightning-strike, my gaming-rig literally spiked... and died...

But, thanks to very nice family-members I got replacement components, very quickly ;) :P since I was getting quite a few bucks in insurance (eventually, may'16) I decided to completely upgrade the whole rig.

After spending an afternoon researching (after months of contemplating on models and makes), I eventually landed on the following choices:

Component selection

  • Gigabyte Z170MX-Gaming 5 motherboard
  • 2 x 8GB Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 2666MHz RAM-modules
  • Intel® Core i5 6600K 3.5GHz CPU
  • Intel® 535 SSD 240GB SATA 3.0 game-storage
  • EVGA GeForce GTX 960 4GB GDDR5 PhysX graphics-adapter
  • Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO CPU-cooler 
No fight to assemble the beast, at least not a lot. The CPU-cooler took some getting used to only having to screw together the mount(s), and pressing it into the motherboard (Cooler Master's *brilliant* Intel-type push-plugs -_-).

All components assembled into north+south-bridge(s)

It also helps to be prepared for a future lightning-strike, by using a 80-PLUS-Gold-certified PSU that sports: over-voltage protection, under-voltage protection, short circuit protection and over power protection.

Corsair RM850x PSU (Power Supply Unit)

Combined with a power-strip sporting surge protection, I'd say I'm much better equipped for the ominous scandinavian weather-system now, than before.

Giving a combined performance-boost of ~50% in heavy 3D and rendering cases :) and (roughly) around a 45-50% reduction in heavy-load temperatures as well as idle temperatures (Intel < AMD), I'd say I'm really pleased ;)



Quite the OP setup, at least compared to my earlier rig (h3x). Geekbench3-results confirm this:
  • quad-g5 geekbench3 multicore-score:
    13380 ('2016)
  • h3x geekbench3 multicore-score:
    8305 ('2013) 

*** FINGERS CROSSED ***



Update May 11th:

Added extra 92mm Cooler Master cpu-fan as exhaust-booster