I finally got all my new parts and upgraded my PC. The installation went well, with no space issues or awkwardly placed screws, and everything booted perfectly first time. I had to change a few of the parts that I had originally intended to get due to availability, but this hasn't affected the performance, just the ease of overclocking.

This is what I ended up with:

Motherboard: MSI X99a Godlike Gaming



CPU: Intel i7-5930K



CPU Cooler: Corsair H80i GT



RAM: 32Gb G.SKILL Ripjaw4 2800MHz DDR4



Graphics Card: Gigabyte 6Gb GeForce GTX 980ti



I hope to have a chance to sit down sometime this week and tweak the OC, but even without any, I've been able to do UHD gaming on maximum settings with everything looking nice and smooth.

What kind of system did you upgrade from, and how are you finding it?

How much of that ram are you actually using, and what kind of data are you processing with it? I find that I rarely actually go over 8GB in my 16GB desktop, and I've been surprised at how well my old i5 2500K has kept up with my number crunching needs. (However, all the really heavy work I do gets processed on a remote cluster anyway.)

Also what kind of case have you packed it into, and how are you liking it over all?

Previously I was running an i7-3930K on an ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard with 32Gb 1600MHz RAM, Corsair H80 cooler and a GeForce GTX 680. There's a marked improvement with UHD gaming. I was down to 15-20fps for some games which I'm now getting 200+ fps for. I haven't put the CPU through much yet, as I've been a bit busy with other things.

I actually use quite a lot of RAM as I'll often have several VMs running simultaneously so that I can test code I'm writing on several OSes at a time.

I've kept the case from my previous build as I really like it. It's a Thermaltake Armor Revo. There's tons of room and tons of drive bays and fan mounts. It also has a hot-swap bay for SATA drives at the top of the front panel which has come in useful a few times.

I've been surprised at how well my old i5 2500K has kept up with my number crunching needs.

QFT. The 2500K turned out to be a great investment for sure. Isn't it 4-5 years old now?

The i5 2500K is almost 5 years now I think. Wasn't horribly new when I got mine, but it has been a very rare time in the last four years that I've done all that much which really capped it out at max cycles for sustained periods. And I haven't even gotten around to over clocking the thing yet, which I was planning to do "in a month or two" after I got it up and running and had a few more pay cheques go by to set aside a bit of money for an after market cooler. It just worked well enough over the core 2 duo I upgraded from that I didn't feel any real pressure to bother with the upgrade at the time. I am getting into more video editing work, so I'm stuck in a debate of whether to upgrade the cooler to overclock a bit and put up with longer render times (Which just means "go make a sandwich or grab the laptop and watch Netflix"), or do an actual upgrade to a 6 or 8 core i7 in a newer rig.

As for filling ram, is there anything that does the job better than throwing up a handful of VMs to test on? Very happy to hear that it is actually being put to use. I'm not sure why, but it makes me sad when I read gaming forums and see people putting in 32 or even 64GB of ram, and then talking about some 32bit game they're playing...

In march i upgraded my graphics card from an 7870 to an r9 290 which gave me a smooth 60fps at 2480x1080 for GTAV. Right now i'm running an i5 4430, but kerbals is very taxing, so i've been keeping an eye out for the i7 4790k to come down a bit in price. If it doesnt it'll probably be a christmas gift i give to myself=-)

CPU choice is waste of money if no render involves , imo. (Actually a poor choice even if render involves as well in comparison to Xeon E5 or E7, not to mention Hyper-V features of Xeon CPUs when it comes to virtualization) Not sure of Skylake roadmap , so hope it doesn't become "obsolete" in no time