PC Upgrade: Complete

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Last week I mentioned how I planned to upgrade my PC, thanks to Steem and to @pennsif for converting them to Amazon UK vouchers. My motherboard arrived last week, my memory, processor and M.2 SSD drive arrived yesterday. I was at a wedding yesterday so I didn't have the opportunity to install my upgrades. Once we returned from the hotel this morning, I set to work.

My first job was to remove the components I was upgrading. This meant taking apart the huge cooler - an ugly but rather excellent Noctua NH-D15. The case is a Fractal Design R5, I chose for it's clever solutions like removable drive bays, clever cable management and the fact that the huge cooler fits in it nicely. As you can see there is plenty of airflow to keep everything nice and cool.

Once I had removed the cooler I disconnected all of the fans and power cables, took out the Nvidia GTX 980 and removed the screws holding the motherboard in place. I then removed the motherboard with the old memory and processor still installed. I took this opportunity to give the inside of the case a little clean, removing dust that had built up over the past few months.

I then got all of my new components together, namely an Asus Prime Z370-P motherboard, an 8th generation Intel i7 8700K, 16GB DDR4 3600Mhz memory from Crucial and a 250GB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 drive.

I first installed the M.2 drive into the motherboard, screwing in a riser and then screwing down the drive to it.

Next I installed the memory modules. I didn't choose the garish colour, they were the only ones in stock at the time. No matter though, I do not have a glass panel on the side of the case as all of the panels are sound dampened, so once the side is on, I won't see the inside.

My brand new processor was next. It amazes me how the smallest component inside the PC is also the most expensive. This i7 has 6 cores and 12 threads which run at 3.7 Ghz stock, which turbo boost up to 4.7 Ghz.

In order to reinstall the Noctua cooler, I first had to mount a bracket through the back of the motherboard.

Turning the PC around once more, I then had to screw these brackets to the previous one.

Once complete, I then replaced the one side panel.

Yes, that's a Steem sticker, all the way from Steemfest in Portugal ^.^

I have read good things about Thermal Grizzly's thermal paste, so I applied a very thin layer to the top of the processor prior to installing the cooler.

In this picture you can see the extra long screwdriver provided by Noctua to tighten the screws holding it in place onto the bracket I showed earlier.

Once secured, I reattached the Noctua fans to the cooler and installed the graphics card. It's always a scary moment when you first switch on a newly upgraded computer - will it boot? Have I plugged everything in correctly? A quick double check confirmed all was in place, so I hit the power button.

IT'S ALIVE! Not only that, but due in large part to the Noctua cooler, and I think because of the new thermal paste I tried, at idle the processor is sitting at 25C / 77F. Result!

Rather than reinstall the operating system and a lot of my programs, I opted to clone the SSD my Windows was sitting on, onto the M.2 drive. This took about 10 minutes. Once done, I booted back into the BIOS and changed my boot drive to the M.2. It felt quicker, but just to check I installed CrystalDiskMark.

On the left is the 960 Evo M.2, on the right is the 850 Evo SSD. Quite the speed difference!

I stress tested the processor and running it at 100% for 30 minutes, the Noctua kept it at a very reasonable 44C / 111.2F.

With my previous processor, the i5 4690k, I always felt it was bottlenecking my graphics card and holding it back. To test my theory I fired up one of my favourite games, Cities Skylines.

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With the camera at a distance previously, I could hit a solid 60 frames a second. However, once I zoomed in this would drop to 25-30 FPS, no matter what options I changed in the graphics settings. Now however, I can see that all of those extra threads are fully utilized by the game, providing me with a blistering performance zoomed all the way in to street level. Only occasionally did the frame rate momentarily drop below 60.

I am currently testing the graphics rendering capabilities of my new rig, but I can already tell it is much improved and I look forward to sharing more 3D design work with you in the near future.

Thanks for reading.

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