So I have nearly finished my new PC build, codename xBit.
I will have a more in depth video detailing the build and benchmarks but until then why not have a blog post on it.
So the name xBit, don't have a lot of meaning, the x is for the Xeon CPU I used and bit just sounded cool mix the two together to get xBit which I think is a cool name I think.
So lets go over all the parts, now before I do that I must warn you that most of this is built from used parts, why? well two reasons
A: it's way cheaper
B: I don't need the power of newer hardware
CPU: For the CPU I went with a Intel Xeon W3550 3.07Ghz Quad core, this little chip is an exact clone of the i7 950 and only cost me £4 (no joke) but I am thinking about upgrading to a hexa core model in the near future.
RAM: The ram is a bit of a mess, at the moment I have a 4gb kit of Corsair XMS3 and a 2gb kit of Kingston, giving me a total of 6gb, again I plan to upgrade this to at least 12gb maybe more (can go up to 48gb)
Motherboard: For the motherboard I decided to go with the mother of all boards, An Asus P6T7 WS, with 7 PCI-e 16x slots with support for quad SLI and a launch price of $429 this thing is no joke, I only paid £50 for this one so I got an amazingly good deal on it.
GPU: Now I am no big gamer, but I wanted a nice card that could handle most games at medium-high settings, so I went and got a Palit GTX 570 for £35, and it my testing I have yet to find a game this card struggles to play and is equivalent to a GTX 950.
PSU: I spent so long browsing for a PSU for this system, but I finally settled on a Seasonic M12II Evo 520W unit, for a b-stock price of £32 I could not go wrong and I am extremely impressed with the build quality on it, for a PSU that costs £60 new this thing is simply amazing.
Case: I spent even longer looking for a case, purely because the motherboard is a CEB form factor which means its slightly longer than a normal ATX board (by like 5cm) and for some reason 99% of case manufactures have decided that motherboard trays with lumps in the motherboard tray is a good idea, meaning only a few cases would work, that case being a Cooler Master N600, it was the ONLY case that has a very nice professional look to it but is sadly discontinued now.
Storage: Just a simple Crucial BX100 256GB SSD and a Seagate Pipeline 500GB hdd, more than enough for my needs.
CPU Cooler: A very plain and simple Cooler Master TX3 Evo, I got mine b-stock for £7 and is way better than one of them stock heatsinks that was designed by someone who did not know what the word cooler means.
Total cost was £201, not bad for a system that will put most "My First Gaming PC" builds to shame, the GTX 750 that they all seem to use is simply crushed by my much cheaper GTX 570, and don't get me started on the CPU, the Pentium G3258 isn't a bad cpu, just no where near as fast as this xeon.
Can you build a better PC?
Yes. Of course you can, but this system was not designed to be the fastest, it was designed to have the best performance per £
A new computer will prob beat this in many ways, but at the end of the day I don't need the power and don't have the money for a new system to begin with making xBit the best option for me.
If you have any suggestions on what you would do differently for a best bang for buck system feel free to post them in the comments.