Nutcuttlit

Count me in with great big bells on

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Hello fellow Glaswegian hopefully bump into you when it's raid time on div 2

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Tonight was superb. A lot of you turned up, 13 in fact so a great start to the recent FG Plans made. Some great games:
 
Sniper Only Free-For-All Shotgun Only Free-For-All Gun Game Shipment clusterfucks Hardpoint Headquarters TDM Scorpion SMG Only And whatever else I can't remember You were being an amazing bunch of bellends and banter was everywhere. Some really can't remember rules - just hilarious when its broken cos someone wants to use an RPG instead of a Sniper or a Grenade instead of a Shotgun 😂 Hopefully some great little video clips were saved by everyone, be good to have a few laughs in the montage video from this. Hope Nutty has got over his hangover in the morning 😂
 
Cheers for the great games all @tronic44 @Greboth @techno @Bluebear @Shucker @Stretch616 @Diddums @Nutcuttlit @MrBiron @Misneach_ @crispymorgan & Ajay.

Give in bud it's less painful that way [emoji23]

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MoHAA was my first, played in a clan comprised mainly of Dutch dudes. Every Saturday Night was a clan war ,I was a very young lad but remember it fondly.

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Yeah only for gear that you got with current group but it's beneficial if you get someone playing tier 3 for you to join them and drop everything as it drops your stuff at max GS for that tier, easy way to boost buds

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Haven't played much since div 2 launched tbh but I had fun playing it and the loot drops really weren't that bad for me. I ended up playing 3 different javelins and getting pretty solid builds on them (enough to smash gm2 anyway) I would recommend it but I wouldn't push a sale of it on anyone.

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I said Dave, I have a brother called Dave and I've met a fair few cunts called Chris 😂😂

Hello and welcome good fellow, always welcome to join me for some div 2 bud

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I may start up another ark server in the near future will keep you guys posted

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Personally I would say just hammer out your main missions so you can get all your unlocks in settlements, if you can't get leveled to beat mains knock out a couple of sides and control points (also used as fast travel locations) spec your shit as you go for survivability as you will likely get munched if you go looking for specific sets before you are lvl 30 plus it's counter intuitive to set for a build as you spend more time looking for loot that you will break down or sell anyway.
Keep all purple in your staff even low level one so you can use the skills from them on the recab stations.

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You can still join (FGD) but you will be playing on eu servers which may cause you some issues with PvP in the dark zone it's your call dude

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I have seriously enjoyed anthem, four javelins to choose from with more coming soon. I can be a crazed melee master or a damage mitigation sponge and a death dealing ball of explosions all in one sitting, if that doesn't get the proverbial juices flowing I don't know what will. Yeah sure it's had it's issue but what game hasn't the division is having issues with ability deployment and cooldown timers

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I may start up another ark server in the near future will keep you guys posted

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

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

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]

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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 🤣🤣

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Plenty of folk Lee, I could also read these lines out for a laugh

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Myself and Marc ( feck aff with the Marc and I shit) will be playing anthem on Friday peeps are more than welcome to join for laughs and brews
 
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Myself and Marc ( feck aff with the Marc and I shit) will be playing anthem on Friday peeps are more than welcome to join for laughs and brews
 
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You can share items hold in r3 to share if it's not had any attachments put on it
 

Well you best check it . . . . . . Meow

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