More shopping ...

    I can't just replace my 'old gremlin' and let it collect dust in a corner. Not after all those years of service and struggles to keep up. My gremlin has been treating me very well and doesn't deserve that. So I decided to keep it for a while longer to help me out where needed as part of my Home Network. This means it will keep most of the 'old' but still useful parts, but some of its parts were bought to eventually serve a new computer. The power supply for example, a nice Antec EarthWatts Series EA-750 Green 750W. Taking it out of my gremlin will take away its life if not replaced with another capable PSU. Since I don't have a replacement, this means more shopping to do! Similar problem I have with the graphics card my gremlin still possesses, a reasonably good and sufficient Geforce GT 630 (2gb). Bought cheap after my old and not so capable previous graphics card died on me. Since I never intended to buy myself a 'beast' of a computer, it was supposed to eventually become part of a 'new and upgraded' computer to last me a while longer. Now that it turns out to become a true beast, this graphics card doesn't suit very well. So yeah, once again ... more shopping to do!

    Basically I have to build my beast and re-build my gremlin to both serve me in my network. My old gremlin doesn't need much and can't deal with all the 'high-tech' stuff anyway. My new beast however, loves the latest technology and can't deal with the old outdated crappy stuff and even if it can, it would just make it look bad. So at the moment I am trying to decide what goes where and what is needed to keep my gremlin alive to serve as a slave for my new beast.

    After some research I came to the conclusion that the PSU in my old gremlin seems a bit outdated. So I just ordered another PSU to go in my beast instead of buying a cheaper 300W-500W PSU for my gremlin. Also finally decided on the CPU cooler to go on top my new i7 and according to the specifications it should fit my motherboard and case. It's huge and will most likely overlap all my RAM memory lanes and might get in the way of the first PCIe lane, but I should be able to fit my graphics card for what I know. I guess we'll find out once I start my build ... lol. Can't wait :-)

    Oh ... and I can't make up my mind on buying myself an even better SSD than the two I already bought (Samsung 840 Evo 120gb). I already made a huge jump compared to what I had before, but with one of them going into my gremlin it feels the other is not beast worthy on its own. Need to think about it some more before I make any hasty decisions, but I do like the Samsung 850 pro. Another reason I might want to wait a while longer is the fact my motherboard has an Ultra M.2 (PCIe Gen3 x4) module which allows to go beyond the limits of the SATA 600 standard (600mb/s), but sharing on the other PCIe lanes and thus limiting there when in use. So far I can only find one reasonable alternative (HP Z Turbo Drive) based on the Samsung XP941 SSD 256gb or 512gb (2gb/s) which are for some reason not being sold separately yet. Another option would be the external LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2 (1tb) which is basically two of those XP941s. Not even sure if I would actually need such speeds although pretty fancy none the less. Maybe in the near future more of those truly fast SSDs will join the market to compete.

Full list of what I got so far:

• ASRock Z97 Extreme6 - Motherboard
• Intel Core i7 4790K - CPU
• G.Skill Ripjaws-X 2x 8GB DDR3 - RAM
• Corsair Obsidian 750D - Case
• 2x Samsung 840 Evo 2.5" SSD 120GB
• 2x 19" Acer V196Lbd LED - Monitors
• Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX770 HerculeZ X3 Ultra 4GB - Graphics Card
• Be quiet! Dark Power PRO 10 850W - Power Supply
• Be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 3 - CPU Cooler

Those last two items on the list will most likely arrive tomorrow ... woot!