New year, new computer

My 4th computer, also known as my gaming machine, decided to quit on the last day of 2013.

Since I suffer serious withdrawal without my gaming machine, it's of utmost importance to get the computer fixed, or get a new one.

Or both. =P

Home finance minister (also known as wifey) has given the green light to build a new computer using the i7-3770K chip I have, so I went shopping on New Year's day after attending the R.O.M. of a dear friend. ^_^

components of my new gaming machine

I also identified the culprit component that caused my 4th computer to stop working, replaced it, and upgraded it to 4GB of memory. It's still a capable computer for most games really.

The 4th computer now replaced the old Core 2 Duo (not one of my gaming machines) that resides in the lounge with the hope that wifey will start playing games with me again.

One can hope.

the graphic card has three fans for cooling, don't play play

My 5th gaming machine, called SoulBot-V following the naming convention since my very first computer, has 8GB of DDR3 1600MHz memory and two 500GB of SATA hard disks. Not SSD because I am poor.

And yes, two 500GB instead of one 1TB because they were seperate purchases and because I moved hard disks around. ^_^

As a gaming machine, the graphic card is the costly component. To get it within the budget though, I couldn't go for the best on offer so I went with Sapphire Radeon Toxic R9 270X 2GB GDDR5 instead.

I didn't go with GeForce this time round and decided to trust the shop owner bang for buck recommendation using Radeon. Hope I won't regret this.

liquid cooling system for my CPU ^_^

Despite the many fans, I am surprised it's a quiet system. Maybe since the fans are still new and clean without dust and grime. =P

The major pain I have with the system, is the OS. First time using Windows 8, and it's... da sucks! >_<

Hope it will be better when I get more used to it, but first time user experience sure is craptastic.

lights up like a Christmas tree with red, blue and yellow =P

Gaming machine is for gaming, blogging, surfing the net, watching movies and listening to music. So I resisted a few days before I finally installed Microsoft Office on it, needed it for the various databases I created in Excel.

Oh well, still felt like I have soiled my gaming machine by installing such work-like software. Sorry SoulBot-V, I have a strange fondness of keeping track of stuff and I need my databases. =(

looks like an angry metal beast with raging fire within

Anyway, I am a happy gamer once again with the new toy. If only I have more time for gaming, that is.