After 7 years of using my first generation Core i7 920 in my main desktop PC, I think it’s finally time for an upgrade. Not really because my current build isn’t good enough, it still is surprisingly, but I just think that 7 years is a pretty damn long life for a CPU, motherboard and RAM combo.

I only recently upgraded my GPU two months ago from an AMD Radeon HD 5850 to an AMD Radeon R9 290 after I was finally noticing that it wasn’t quite cutting it on the most recent games. However now if I wanted to upgrade my RAM to something more than just 6GB, I don’t think it’s worth it to just buy an old triple channel DDR3 kit and use it in my existing motherboard. It’s time for a whole new motherboard, CPU and RAM combo.

I’ve also been looking at a new PC case. My current one is an Antec P180 which I’ve used in the last two PC builds, from all the way back to 2007 or so. It’s just a bit too small inside for the longer graphics cards these days, and I’ve already had to replace two of the three fans in it since their berings gave out.

I’ve been getting myself up-to-speed on the newest Intel CPU architectures and chipsets, and I am fairly certain that I’ll be going with the latest Skylake architecture with either the new Z180 chipset or the H170 chipset, depending if I go with an unlocked CPU or not. I still haven’t decided if I’ll get an i5-6500 locked CPU, or an i5-6600K unlocked CPU to allow for overclocking later on if I want to.