On Dec 22, 2015, at 3:45 PM, Gillian Densmore wrote:@Ray I'd think it's problematic to upgrade a CPU. Where as cards are meant to give a little more life.Not necessarily. The X79 chipset boards with LGA2011 sockets, first released in 201, supported Sandy Bridge-E/EP and Ivy Bridge-E/EP processors until the release of the Ivy Bridge E/EX in 2014. The LGA-1155 sockets and chipsets supported Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. Haswell and Broadwell moved the voltage regulator onto the chip which necessitated the change to LGA-1150, while Skylake has shed the VRM and has the new LGA1151 (as will the future Kaby Lake). Basically, you can be moderately confident that your motherboard will last through an entire Tick-Tock cycle (two generations of Intel CPUs).The budget systems guides sugest 8 gigs of ram. In my experience that isn't enough. 16 gigs would likely give way more room for Winderz (or Linux)That depends on what you're doing. Tech Report's builds are aimed at gaming enthusiasts, so the budget version is meant for low-end gaming. That said, you should be able to run games that are new and not optimized like "ARK: Survival Evolved" on an 8GB memory system. You might have trouble with single player mode that runs the game client and server on the local system - I have that problem so I use a remote server and just run the client on my 6GB laptop.A SSD drive might also add a little more pep.The TR folks allow that some people can't afford an SSD (and are stuck with a 1TB 7200rpm drive) but they recommend 250GB SSDs which start at only $25 more.A hardy workhorse Hard drive with external backup would also likely be something I'd want to haveThe TR guide suggests have 2 to 4GB spinning platter drives for mass storage, either singly or in RAID.TR split their system guide into three parts this year. Backup systems are in the peripheral picks and one of the best ones is an external socket device that can accept both sizes of SATA drives. That lets you use your old, too-small, hard drives as backup, if they still have acceptable bad block counts.A midrange graphics card definatly.As a pragmatist I find it perplexing to get a 8Gb graphics card.Quad or UHD (3840x2160) displays are the driver for more graphics memory. If your monitor is a simple 1080P HD, then you don't need that amount of memory.I can see getting a 2gig or possible even 4gig graphics card. Historically that basicaly ment go to chipmerchant.com look up midrange Geforce and 2x check reviews and what's compatible.It all depends on your monitor and the detail settings of your games.ATI(now AMD) are no slouch. Though for some reason they have a history of quirikeness, In my epxerience I've needed to make some small adjustments to display and catalysts configuration to get a little pep.I have no clue why.They're still problematic. When they work, they work well, but sometimes they drive me crazy. For a while, there were certain capabilities in the ATI/AMD GPUs that were much better than the Invidia cards for cryptographic table building and brute-forcing. The Bitcoin people went nuts over the AMD GPUs.
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