My New Haswell Rig: A Two-Part Review

[ragingwhisky]

Picked up Metro....it's pretty...and I know it's stressing the system...but I'm still craving the "wow" factor that the original CRYSIS held.

Call me picky but Battlefield 4 seems like it may be the big contender to bring the desktop to it's knees. Good job I'm accustomed to gaming at 720p

Did however pickup METRO 2033 (the book) the other day.

 

[lee50_10]

Picked up Metro....it's pretty...and I know it's stressing the system...but I'm still craving the "wow" factor that the original CRYSIS held.

Call me picky but Battlefield 4 seems like it may be the big contender to bring the desktop to it's knees. Good job I'm accustomed to gaming at 720p

Did however pickup METRO 2033 (the book) the other day.

What spec do you have?

 

[Boozad]

Virtually the same as mine.

 

[lee50_10]

Does metro stress the system much?

 

[Boozad]

Not stress it per sé, but it is one of the more graphically intensive games which should at least put the 780 through its paces.

 

[lee50_10]

Ok good as i want to destroy it with my 780.

 

[Boozad]

I've been playing Crysis 3 on very high settings and it's handling it with no problem at all. It should do the same to Last Light.

 

[Boozad]

Well it's been three months since I received the rig so I thought I'd post a quick update.

For one, it feels like I've had it much longer than three months, in a good way! I'm so used to it and I don't think I could turn back to a lower spec rig now. The SSD does make a big difference when you get used to fast OS boot times (and shutdown in a five seconds or so) and super quick most-used programs load times and there's no way I'll go back now I have one. When I use the AMD rig with the Caviar Black as the OS drive it's incredibly frustrating, and work PCs are absolute carthorses by comparison.
I've been keeping the OS and drives as pristine as possible, making regular Macrium images, scanning with MalwareBytes, defragging my Black where all of my games are stored etc, and it's still running as smooth as silk. Game performance is still outstanding and the 780 really was worth the money, in my eyes anyway. Temperatures are fine while under load which is testament to the quiet case, and noise levels are still very low even when in th emiddle of 64 player Ziba Tower mayhem on BF3.

So once again, huge kudos to PCS on what continues to be a phenomenal machine, I love it to bits. I'll probably look at adding another 8GB of RAM soon just so it's there, and maybe in a year or so I'll up to the 4770k if needed. I've never really loved any of my PCs before, but this one's bucked that trend.

 

[keynes]

Well it's been three months since I received the rig so I thought I'd post a quick update.

For one, it feels like I've had it much longer than three months, in a good way! I'm so used to it and I don't think I could turn back to a lower spec rig now. The SSD does make a big difference when you get used to fast OS boot times (and shutdown in a five seconds or so) and super quick most-used programs load times and there's no way I'll go back now I have one. When I use the AMD rig with the Caviar Black as the OS drive it's incredibly frustrating, and work PCs are absolute carthorses by comparison.
I've been keeping the OS and drives as pristine as possible, making regular Macrium images, scanning with MalwareBytes, defragging my Black where all of my games are stored etc, and it's still running as smooth as silk. Game performance is still outstanding and the 780 really was worth the money, in my eyes anyway. Temperatures are fine while under load which is testament to the quiet case, and noise levels are still very low even when in th emiddle of 64 player Ziba Tower mayhem on BF3.

So once again, huge kudos to PCS on what continues to be a phenomenal machine, I love it to bits. I'll probably look at adding another 8GB of RAM soon just so it's there, and maybe in a year or so I'll up to the 4770k if needed. I've never really loved any of my PCs before, but this one's bucked that trend.

Nice

 

[Boozad]

Time for an update. Coming up to the two year mark and my annoyance at ordering an i5 instead of an i7 got the better of me so I flashed my BIOS and ordered an i7-4790k, along with a Corsair H80i cooler. Set to work on the rig this morning and things are mighty fine. The 4790k is a devil of a CPU, you really can tell the difference, and my PCS rig goes from strength to strength. I may need to source some new fans for my H80i though, these things sound like a sodding aeroplane.

 

[Boozad]