My Ultimate Upgrade

Its that time, I have been maxing out my machine repeatedly, I had two options upgrade or build new.

Money determined that an upgrade is all I can afford, between the server rebuild earlier in the year, building myself a new rack-mount table and just generally being skint my budget was low, super low, like £200.

Lets go over what the machine is....

I'm running an Intel Core i7 950 3.0ghz.  This is a four core (eight thread) chip, it cost the earth when I bought it as an early adopter of the newly released Core i7 series.  My upgrade comes in the form of an Intel Xeon X5670, clocked slightly slower I do plan to overclock the chip, but it lifts me to 6 cores (12 threads).  There's also a whopping increase in L3 cache, I see this as the last and only upgrade path for this machine.

The motherboard hosting this is a very trusty Asus P6X58-e, I've loved every minute of this board, and hope that applying the overclock will be as easy as everything else working with it.

As I am overclocking however, it's going to be a full tear down of the machine, a full clean, replacing the heatsink pads & compounds throughout and cleaning it all up.  This will be the first time I'll have taken the motherboard out of it's residential case since I built the machine.

For RAM I've been very happily running 6 x 2GB Corsair XMS3 DDR3 at 1333mhz, actually underclocking the memory as it's 1600mhz rated, but running it any faster than 1333mhz I ran into heat issues and instability.

With the rebuild however, I've bought second hand sticks of the Corsair XMS3 DDR3 but 4GB sticks, since I want to retain triple channel functionality I want six matching rated sticks, however, the number of sellers with matching sets is hard to find, there's lots of XMS3 about, but you get a speed spectrum from 1600mhz to 2000mhz stick, I've gotten some listed as different versions too, so I'm hoping everything will be okay and I can homogenise the sticks I have.

The power supply remains the Corsair I have had a while, but I am going to try and clean it out.

Brian over at TechYesCity on YouTube, often recommends using WD40 to coat parts and keep them working longer, I may have to check this on my secondary Core 2 Duo machine to see if it works before going for it on this my main machine.

The final upgrade is to sort out and replace the filters with something high micron rated, HEPA filter pads across the bottom.

I've been interested at looking at new CPU's and GPU's for a couple of days, not that I can afford one, but I've come to a cross roads in my thinking...

Now I can either carry straight on, or I can go left or right.. If I go left, then K is the way, if I go right its not... Let me explain.

When I talk about K, I'm talking about the current Gaming Goto Intel Core processor with a K added on, so this is the i5 4670 K and the matching i7.  Every time I turn a page about Gaming and building a gaming rig I see people say "Get the K" version... And for the life of me I can't figure out why, maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see people explaining why.

Now, you can look any place to see these chips, here they are on Amazon... And you can notice something here, a price difference, the K version has a higher price... I'm taking the right path... Right K, more cost, an added letter... It must do More!!!! MORE!... MWHOORE!!!!!.... Nope, as far as I can see the K chip does less...

The cheaper standard 4670 here does more, lets take a look at the Intel Ark page listing them...

So on the Ark there you can highlight the rows which are different, now some of the items are highlighted in error, but if we skip down to the bottom, this is where the functional changes are.  The K version has some of the Virtual technology removed...

I use that technology a lot, so a K version is not for me... But curiously, with functionality removed, the K version costs more?

This is where I'm confused, go right, enjoy the K and be in all the gaming comments... but don't be able to virtualize?  And pay more?  Go figure.

Lots of the kits I see out are also the K version bundled in.

I don't get it... I'm not able to go left, I'm not able to buy one of these kits... I don't want to go right, and buy a K.. Cus they're nerfed... So I'll just have to go straight on...

Is my direction metaphor grating?... Sorry, its because I have directions - from the multiboxer - on the mind.