What: Motherboard – MSI X99S SLI Plus, Processor- Intel i7 5820K, RAM – Crucial DDR4 4GBx2, CPU cooler- Coolermaster Hyper 212

Why I bought: My PC was weeping for upgrades. This is actually a partial upgrade; after the holidays I’m getting more RAM, new hard drives, ect. The exact build was determined by a very specific budget, and what I (and the sales guy) thought was the most PC I could make with the money and Microcenter’s current sales.

Where I bought it: Microcenter.

What it was like: I came in with a DDR3 build in mind, but realized with sales I could go ahead and go DDR4. The guy who helped me was pretty awesome, and knew their deals really well.

The real experience came after the purchase. The physical assembly went easily. Everything powered on the first time. Then it became apparent that a Windows reinstall was going to need to happen. I had to borrow a keyboard because my fancy gamer street cred peripherals wouldn’t run without drivers. But the re-install wasn’t a terrible surprise, and then it worked. Except for my storage drive, which insisted on trying to be the boot drive, no matter what I did in bios. (Another drive I use for storage, that still has XP on it and should probably not work easily as a storage drive totally works though.) I fought with the storage drive for a week, before it resolved the problem unexpectedly by emitting a large spark for no apparent reason and dying. Its now in recovery.

(It was mostly backed up, but what wasn’t I don’t want to lose. I don’t have a great solution for video double backups.) So, moral of the story.. Throw money at the problem earlier. By that I mean, buy more storage drives and back up. And buy a new drive at the first sign of trouble with an old one.

And that is why I haven’t posted in awhile.