Baby Gaming Rig gets Liquid Cooling and an 8-core brain
I did a couple of updates over the weekend and more than just video cards. The baby gaming rig I bought off a co-worker also went under the knife and came out with some new parts. A buddy helped me make some pretty hefty changes.
If you recall, that was a Phenom X4 965 Black Edition which had excellent speed and I stuffed it chock full of 32GB of ram. Well, everything was right with the world and I was having a fine time playing Call of Juarez … Until …
The AMD FX 8350 8 core processor went on sale. I’d already bought the liquid cooler for it and since we were going to be in there anyway, why not turn up the processor speed to 11? And so we did.
The old fan and processor came out and the 8-core and liquid cooling went in. We had far less trouble this time around. Everything made a lot more sense. We also managed to find a place for the fan we removed off the back of the case. It’s now on the side pulling in even more air. It wasn’t spinning very fast, but then again, it wasn’t under load.
My friend bought the Antec liquid cooling system which was a little easier to install and very quiet. However, now that we’ve messed around with both he would go for the Corsair H80i next time. The Corsair has thicker tubing, has dual fans instead of the single and comes with the Corsair link so you can monitor the temperature of devices. The price difference was only about $10. I would have to agree.
This is a relatively bare bones systems. It’s main goal in life is to play some games and *maybe* load some virtual machines if I need them. The board doesn’t support SLI and only USB 2 and SATA 2. But that’s fine with me. Even with that, it’s insanely fast. With 8-cores and 32GB it plows through calculations.
It was a budget rig, but it’s not really one anymore. It should have plenty of years of longevity.
AMD FD8350FRHKBOX FX-8350 FX-Series 8-Core Black Edition
Corsair Hydro Series Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler H80i
Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10)
