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I've been using my trusty old 2500k with 8gb of DDR3 and and an R9 290 4gb for years. To put this in to some perspective, the R9 290 was bought a few weeks after our first Eurogamer meet and the 2500k a few years before that. It still works fairly well, runs anything and some games quite well, but there are titles out there which are starting to seriously stress the poor 2500k. I overclocked it to 4.4ghz, it's perfectly stable and has run like this for a few weeks with no problems and never going above 62deg. An upgrade has always been in the back of my mind but I've never thought I game enough on PC to justify spending over a grand on new stuff, despite you guys buying me games to get me back in to PC gaming. Star Citizen really hammered home how old this beast it getting and truth be told it sort of soured the taste a bit because I was gifted this awesome game by awesome people and couldn't even join them on it. Nevertheless, I spotted some old gaming PCs lying in my boss' storage at work. They looked lost, forlorn and like they hadn't been touched in years, so I asked what he wanted to do with them. I was told "take them, just wipe the drives" (midget porn? idk). Not knowing what I was getting apart from one very obviously being an Alienware Area 51 and the other an Origin PC, I gladly took them off his hands. Some photos: The Origin PC, cased in a beautiful, if slightly tatty Corsair Obsidian case (this was like a £400 case years ago): The Alienware. This case looks pretty but I can't stand it, where the fuck do I put my feet? Side note: This thing is heavy. I don't mean a little porky, I mean heavy. So that was out instantly, impractical, overweight, old, and nothing on top. A bit like me then. This is where things start to get interesting. I took this photo and only properly studied it a few days later. The keen eyed amongst you will notice a few things: Blue USB ports, so it's USB 3. It's not that old then. Core i7. I wasn't sure of the exact architecture, but I remember when Sandy Bridge came out, Intel changed their sticker so you knew it was a Sandy Bridge from the outside. I never looked in to this one, but Alienware tends to be high spec stuff. Another little detail which I'm sure you're all screaming about by now (I'm such a little tease aren't I?) is that it has two graphics cards: My interest was firmly piqued at this point, and excitement started building a bit. My hopes were for a 2600k, maybe 16gb of DDR3 and a pair of GTX 680s. This however gave me a little taster: Well, I can now confirm, having stripped all this stuff down, that the Alienware had two GTX 980s in SLI, 32gb of DDR4 (!), and a Haswell-E i7 5930k sitting handily under a closed loop water cooler which is OEM but a bit of the ol' scratch'n'sniff revealed it to be an Asetek, which is pretty decent, so I'll be keeping it for now. As you can tell however, this thing is dusty. Like the inside of Susan Boyle's coin purse dusty. This is going to need a load of work. The case is a load of wank so that's going in the bin. The motherboard is also some OEM jobbie but it's made by Foxconn who make tons of good stuff so it can't be that bad. The PSU is a Dell (Dell makes Alienware) 1200w jobbie, but it's amazingly enough 80 Plus gold rated (which apart from Platinum, is the highest quality rating you can get). It's also fully modular and has obviously fed this hungry beast with power for years so it's going to get a clean up and used if it'll fit (it's some weird shape, but looks like it'll work). The Origin contained the i7 2600k I wanted, 16gb of DDR3 and a single GTX 580. The PSU is a Corsair 850w non-modular so this will be plan B. Amazingly, the motherboard in this system is one I lusted after for years: An Asus P8-P67 Pro, which was pretty much the king of the hill when Sandy Bridge (both my i5 2500k and this i7 2600k are Sandy Bridge chips) was launched. The case however, is beautiful. So, time to tear it all to pieces and get to work. The motherboard seems to be a standard ATX form factor so fits perfectly in to the Corsair case. Some of the connections are questionable, such as the audio connector which is slap-bang in the middle of the motherboard so will need a bit of creativity to get it to look neat: The age difference between the case and the motherboard is fairly significant, so there are connections on both which the other doesn't accommodate. The case has Firewire, which by the time the Alienware was made, was consigned to the history books, and the case doesn't have USB3 connectivity whereas the motherboard has the interface for it, so I may need to get creative on that front too. The Haswell E CPU is considerably larger than the Sandy Bridge too: The 5930k has 50% more cores at 6, and the same for threads at 12, and it will clock fairly high so it'll run circles around this 2600k. These aren't pretty sticks, but what we're looking at here are 4x 8gb DDR4 2133mhz sticks of RAM: Aaaand installed: The graphics cards were seriously dirty and needed a bit of extra TLC: Time for a good stripdown for a clean and rebuild: Here's a comparison of before and after: Side note: the build quality of these things is amazing. Props to Nvidia. The SLI bridge is such an odd component, these things are literally fancy plugs and cost a fucking fortune: And installed: And that's where I'm at now. Yes the CPU is installed and no there's no cooler on it as I have no thermal paste so will grab some tomorrow. I might also pull the 980s apart and redo the paste on them too. The CPU is just to prevent the pins getting bent. To give you an idea of how neglected and dirty these components were, here are a few photos: So that's first on the list for tomorrow, then do the thermal paste, clean and install the power supply, sort out the storage and optical drives, give it a last clean and see what she does. I'll probably benchmark my current system so I have a proper comparison in terms of performance. This has been a bit of a road of self-discovery again if I'm honest, due to various personal reasons I sort of lost my soul for a few years and had zero inspiration to do anything, so I just sort of drank a lot and played loads of video games. Now in my new job, having weekends off, having less debt and being able to afford things again, I can feel my soul coming back and this little session this afternoon has shown me again how much I love this stuff. Really looking forward to carrying on tomorrow Cheerio!

Awesome write up. Great little project. Keep it up[emoji8][emoji8][emoji846] Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Happy St Patrick's Day one and all!

Hope the ref donated his match fee to the RNIB [emoji23][emoji23] Via the FG App

A couple in quite happy with as im a complete noob

Wow, great job didds. I would have stuck my head in the oven by now.

The only problem I can see with the clans Chad is it asks for a region when setting up, everyone in the clan has been promoted to Lt so they can invite and also accept requests also everyone must dawn mutton chops and long hair or yer oot 🤣🤣 Via the FG App

I'm doing exactly the same. Clearing out each zone fully before moving on. Plus, doing things like taking over control points gives access to a room with nice loot. And the loot respawns. 12 hours in and I'm only level 9. Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

People are saying the most effective way to rank up is to do the campaign first then side missions/events but fuck that; I'd rather just work through each section at a time even if the XP doesn't scale as much. I'm in no rush to get to the dark zone or endgame and I don't want to do a story and then have 100+ less interesting things to do back to back. I've actually only done the first mission after nearly 5 hours.

Love the bike and Tiger ones @techno! 👏👏👏

My God. Unreal. There's some unagi going on here.

This is cool. The transparent magazine actually shows the ammo being used! https://i.imgur.com/VMLg6pj.gifv

Finale to the Oxford game was very controversial today:- - Bradford miss a last minute sitter from 6 yards - poor shot under pressure from defence - We break from a goal kick and score on the counter attack to go 1-0 up 4 minutes into injury time - Celebrations were mental and Bradford left deflated and bottom of the league - Ball put back on the centre circle and Bradford resume with seconds to play - Ref stops game out of nowhere, consults the far side linesman and then disallows the goal and then awards a penalty to Bradford WTF!? - Ref changes his mind, cancels penalty and orders goal kick to be re-taken because of possible encroachment after not being convinced it was a penalty on lino's advice - 4th official then tells ref to cancel the goal kick retake - Other linesman confirms goal was legit his side - Ref gets confused and doesn't know whether to award a goal, goal kick or penalty. - Ref decides to re-instate the goal 5 minutes after the ball originally hit the net - Bradford kick off once again and nobody including the ref has a clue what's just happened I have not seen anything like in the hundreds of matches I've watched over the years. The ref lost control, awarded 3 different things in the space of 30 seconds and then had to rely on two other officials to make a decision for him. Just extraordinary scenes.

The mainstream media and toxic social media are largely to blame. It's become a massive generation issue and is only going to get worse. I dread to think where we will be in a decades time. You have right wing extremism growing, islamic terrorism, left wing extremism, gang warfare and even the LGBTQ mafia want people jailed for mis-gendering. Politicians are more clueless and detached than ever and the resources aren't there to combat such growth of hatred.

Mate, just turning off GPS and finding my own way to a destination, wandering into alleys and basement garages, finding lots of wonderful loot is very satisfying [emoji846] Sent from my SM-G955F using Tapatalk

Okay, I really dont think it will get completely left behind. If you really look at all the reviews and the people that have it here @Nutcuttlit @J&B @SensaiNemesis, etc, they've all said the game is really fun and has some stunning parts to it - the loot is an issue as well as content at launch on which I can see. I think most people agree that the game in around 3-6 months will be a pretty good buy because it should have had time to fix and release content and loot alongside the fact the game will be cheaper. I'll pay £30 for it at some point after Cataclysms come out. If EA had something about them, I'd make a marketing campaign as soon as all the large content comes out to recapture some audiences. The underlying framework of a story, mechanics and gameplay (somewhat to Destiny 1 but a little less imo) is there and pretty solid and fun. I'd like to be more positive about games rather than not anymore. The expectations of companies are at an all time high - yes,yes I know they had c.6 years. We'd still expect the world and more though.

For this weekend only, you can sample the $50 4 maps included in the Black Ops pass for free. Whoopee. ThIs Is So CoOl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111!!!!!!!111111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1111111 FREE MAPS THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN FREE FOR THREE DAYS YIPEEEEEEEEEE. I'll stick to The Division 2 thanks.

Well, from my research, it seems that if you get a computer with Max-Q Design, they're quieter. https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/nvidia-max-q-faq https://en.softonic.com/solutions/what-are-the-best-quiet-gaming-laptops So far, I haven't found a 'quiet' one that's under £1000! 😤

@Spacedeck It really doesn't matter what version, orchestra etc. - the music is usually the same, just played very slightly differently by different players (i.e. different interpretations) if that makes sense. There are different genres of classical music and they're based mainly on periods in time - medieval, baroque, classical, romantic, 20th century and modern. For example, Mozart is a classical composer, JS Bach is a baroque composer, Brahms is a romantic composer etc. etc. When I get a bit of time, I'll do a beginners guide!

Here's the best one from the Goodwood Revival last year spoiler tagged too as there's 30 of them