I Built a New PC!

 Any regular readers - do I have those? Or just people who google for specific guides? - will know that I bought my PC in 2013 and that's why The Sims 3 looks like that. I've now built a new one. Well, almost new. 

It all started with The Forgotten City, a time-travel adventure a la Sexy Brutale, Elsinore, and Groundhog Day. Your character gets transported almost 2000 years back in time to a Roman city which lives under the threat of The Golden Rule.

Not that one.

The Golden Rule is thou must not cause harm to others, including stealing, injuring, or threatening to kill them. If anyone breaks the rule, everyone in the city will be turned into golden statues. This has happened at least once before, since the city is full of said statues already. Your job - should you choose to accept it rather than continue in infinite loops - is to figure out who will break the rule and stop them, so the day you keep repeating doesn't end with everyone dying.

It was a great game and I was obsessed with it for about a fortnight. After that, I was still obsessed with it, but I'd completed it several times - just to see if I could do it any faster, or with no deaths at all, or in a shorter time - and had all the achievements. It was then that I remembered that The Forgotten City began life as a Skyrim mod, an extra questline/area added by a member of the community. So, if I wanted to play the game again but the first time, that was the way to do it.

I wasn't sure if I was going to like Skyrim. I'm not generally into action games and first person games make me motion sick. So I bought it for the cheapest possible price, by buying an old CD code (since the original version is disabled on Steam). 

Turns out, I love Skyrim. It's like The Sims 3 but with one person and they kill dragons. It has all the roleplaying that I like and it didn't even make me motion sick. When it went on sale, I bought the special edition with all the DLC, since that was cheaper than buying the DLC for the old version and I've now been playing it for a few months. I've reached the point of Skyrim where half the game is adding mods then trouble-shooting the mods you just added to see if your save will still load.

Skyrim was originally released in 2011, so my PC could handle it, but mods were pushing it. I'm starting a graduate scheme in September, which will mean more money coming in. Those things together made now seem like a good time to upgrade, since I'll have two months with nothing to do but play.

I started by using UserBenchMark to see how my PC was doing. It turns out, my little integrated graphics card was performing better than 99% of its sisters, that is, the same graphics card installed in different machines. Unfortunately, that card was only getting about 3% of the performance of newer cards, and it wasn't the best since it's just the one that's installed in my i5-4440, that is the CPU that came installed in my PC. That was the obvious upgrade. I also wanted to get a solid state drive, or SSD, which is faster than my old hard-drive, and some new RAM.

I used PCPartPicker to pick out some pieces that would match. I ended up needing a new pc case - did you know graphics cards are huge? - and a new motherboard. I first got a second-hand Nvidia GTE 1060 which was £125 second-hand. I starting writing this post about 9 months ago and that one kept breaking down, so I've since replaced it with an AMD RX 580 which is working a lot better. That was £100 second-hand.

I first upgraded the RAM to 8gb of Patriot Viper DDR3, then to 16gb. Since the 16gb is also Patriot Viper DDR3, after installing it, I put the 8gb into the other two slots, and they all seem to be working together. It's probably not working as well as if I'd somehow bought one pack of 24gb RAM, but it's working better than 16gb by itself, so I'll take it. The 16gb cost around £40, and the 8GB was £25. For context, you're ideally supposed to buy all your ram sticks in one package, because then all the sticks will have been tested to make sure they work smoothly together. If you don't do that, using the same brand increases your chances of them being compatible. Or so I've read. Go on and correct me if I'm wrong.

I can't remember what my old motherboard was, but now it's a second-hand Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H which is working great. That was £30 on eBay. I don't remember if I strictly needed to replace it, or if I just wanted to. The case was also about £30. I also needed a new power supply, which was £25.

That's about as far as I can go with that, since I didn't want to buy a new CPU. At some point, I'll need to buy a new CPU, which will mean buying a new motherboard, which will mean buying new RAM. That's because, a few generations after the i5, the way the core connects to the motherboard changed. The i5-4440 has an 1150 socket, so it can only be attached to motherboards with that same connector. The RAM connectors also changed. Upgraded motherboards tend to accept DDR4 RAM, not DDR3.

I upgraded my hard drive to a Crucial MX500 1TB solid state drive, which cost just shy of £80. I did also need a new SATA cable, which was about £12. I still have my old hard drive in there. I use it to store Steam games that don't suffer from being on the slower drive. In theory, I can still plug in the CD drive from my original PC, but it won't fit into the case, so I need to leave the cables sticking out through one of the air holes if I want to do that and kind of balance the CD drive next to it.

Anyway, this whole thing was much, much easier and cheaper than I expected it to be. The first round of upgrades came to around £330, which is about what I paid for the PC back in 2013, and the second round was another £140. There were some tricky moments, but nothing I couldn't get past with a YouTube tutorial. 

When wiring the thing together, make sure it's switched off and look out for static electricity. Don't wear anything fluffy, don't work on a carpet, and remember to earth yourself by touching something metal before touching your PC. The trickiest bit was resetting the motherboard by purposefully connected two pins with a metal screwdriver, and that was mostly because I'd read so many warnings about static electricity that purposefully causing electricity to arc through the motherboard seemed daunting. It worked though. Don't do that unless your specific motherboard needs it. Mine did because it was second-hand and the previous owner had set a password on it.

Skyrim is now running smoothly with 300+ mods, so that's what I'll be doing for the foreseeable future.