Bye Bye PC PC

So my old, old PC of nearly 10 years finally cycled away. It's been on the fritz for the past few years (as least) and was definitely a cranky old lady for the past 12 months.

All things considered, I think it didn't do too badly. It's visited a number of countries, has spent time at sea and in planes. I've only had to replace the motherboard, but aside from that every other component has held out well.

Unfortunately, there's nothing much for me to salvage. I've taken out the hard disks. I'll throw them into the new PC, copy everything over, then bin them. The graphics card is ancient, the ram is old DDR3 with not particularly fast timings so I doubt anyone would want that. I'll give it to the local recycling centre and maybe they'll give me a fiver for it. That aside I don't know if there's much else I can do with it.

I was hoping it would last another few months until the new cpu's and cards come out, but things never really work out as planned. I have to save up for some life stuff in the next few months, but after that I should be able to get a decent PC. It'll be fun to catch back up on the games I couldn't play for the past few years, not to mention rendering out scenes in my little personal project will be about a bajillion times faster which is nice.

That's all future talk, however, so for the time being I'll just have to keep working hard so I can save up enough to buy the mystical future PC.

OHMYGODTHERAMITFINALLYGOTHERE

SO the RAM turned up, not five minutes ago.  I've been chilling, on account of my having no money left after I bought a steroid abusing computer.

Is that?  Is that really?  Why yes, I think that is 16gigs of unbuffered non-ecc ram, running at CL 7-8-7-24.  Not the tightest timings, but at DDR3 1600 they'll serve my purposes.  In fact, one stick of this stuff would probably have served my purposes.

The case is from a company called BitFenix (probably chinese) and it's the 'survivor,' model.  Check here for my initial impressions.

To backtrack a little, this is the open case with a pre-installation wiring solution.  It's actually pretty solid.  I only had to move two wires around, the big fan at the top (to the mobo fan 1 pin, which is at the top of this board, not the bottom) and the sound ports for the top of the PC.

The graphics card is MASSIVE.  I mean that quite literally, as it's both heavy and big.  My case is no shrinking violet, yet it only fits in by the slimmest of margins.  It takes up two PCI slots, and let me emphasise this again, it weighs a ton.

I envisage this case being moved around a lot, so everything is as secure as I can make it.