My new PC is officially complete!

I decided on an i5-6600K with a Z170 chipset which allows me to overclock the CPU (which I haven’t done yet). For the motherboard, I knew that I didn’t want to spend something ridiculous like $200; I just wanted one that had at least six USB ports on the rear IO panel, six SATA ports, no stupid LEDs, and priced in the $100 - $150 range. I chose the Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 motherboard mainly because it fit the above requirements, had a good looking UEFI menu interface, and it was on sale at the time (with an additional mail-in rebate!).

CPU cooler chosen was a personal favourite in the PC building community - the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. This thing can usually be found for $35 - $40 and it does a great job at cooling, assuming you’re doing doing some insane overclocking, and it is compatible with many of the modern Intel LGA sockets.

For RAM, I knew I wanted to get 16GB in order to give myself a bit of future proofing. After living with just 6GB of RAM for over 7 years, having more than double that and not having to even think about RAM usage is a breath of fresh air. For RAM I didn’t really care what brand it was, since there really are only about three different semiconductor fabs that sell to all other memory brands. The only other differences between brands is styling of the heat spreaders and company support. I decided on getting one of the cheapest DDR4-2400 16GB memory kits (preferably 2 x 8GB sticks) that I could find. Ended up choosing Mushkin Blackline 997199T for $100.

I also went with a brand new PC case, and chose the Define R5 from Fractal Design. I’ve always liked the simple, professional looking cases and I think that cases with bright colours, weird curves or ones with all of those whizz-bang LEDs are just tacky looking and ugly. I don’t even much like the window on the side of cases either, since I’m never going to be looking at the side of it anyway.

I also decided to completely forgo having an optical drive, since I really never use it these days. Besides, all of the optical drives that I currently own still use the old PATA interface, so I’d need to buy one with a SATA interface if I really wanted to use one.

Finally, I decided to move on to Windows 10 instead of staying with Windows 7. I was a bit hesitant at first, mainly because of the forced changes to how Windows updates are handled, but also because I don’t care for the Windows app store or any of those “apps”. Turns out though, there is a solution to stopping Windows from forcibly rebooting my machine, and only having it update when I’m ready and want it to. Windows 10 is the new way to go, so I might as well switch over to it now at the same time as a new PC build, otherwise it would be even more of a pain later on.