This holiday season was especially tortuous; I had a mountain of computer parts sitting in my office taunting me while I was enjoying the holidays with family and friends. Sure, I was happy to be spending that time with them, but it was a little bittersweet since I wanted also to be playing with my shiny new toys.

On New Year's Eve, I got started opening boxes and assembling the computer. For the most part, everything went together very smoothly. Between starting to put everything together and putting the wrapping touches on this blog, I encountered two minor problems and two major ones:

Minor Problems

1. The CPU Cooler (Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus) I bought was ginormous; it was virtually bigger than my head! It took a little bit of elbow grease and sweat to get it mounted correctly and squeezed into the case.

2. The monitor had a sticker on it that was very difficult to peel off the bezel. It took me longer to carefully remove the sticker than what it took for the operating system, Windows 7, to load from scratch.

Major Problems

1. The RAM I bought, Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000) , is being auto-detected at 1333MHz instead of 1866MHz. Manually setting the RAM's multiplier results in the motherboard saying you're being too aggressive in your overclocking, and defaulting back to 1333MHz. I spoke with Corsair's technical support people and they turned me on to this DDR3 Memory Frequency Guide from AMD. Apparently, when using all 4 DIMM slots it's not possible to run at 1866MHz. This was an unfortunate mistake I didn't catch in time. I suppose I could return the RAM and exchange it for something cheaper, or I could spend quite a few more bucks and get 2x16GB 1600MHz to stay at 32GB total and almost attain the faster speed I wanted. In the end, I was so happy with the machine, I didn't want the cost savings from buying slower RAM or the performance gain of working around this you-cant-run-4-DIMMs-at-1866MHz-on-AMD-FX-CPUs issue.
2. Before the upgrade, I was unaware that Windows 7 Home Premium is limited to a maximum of 16GB of System RAM. After tinkering with limiting the system RAM for disk benchmarks, I stumbled across the fact that Windows was reporting a system of 32GB system RAM, but only 16GB of it was usable. In order to get to use all 32GB of the RAM, I had upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional (or Ultimate). The most disappointing part of this was that it cost me an additional $90 to do the Windows Anytime Upgrade.

The Butt Dyno

For those of you not into cars, the Butt Dyno is an unscientific way for a driver to measure the effect of an upgrade to his car. It's not a precise or specific measurement, but it's significant; if you could feel the effect of the upgrade then you could enjoy the upgrade and brag about it to your friends. The same can be applied to computers; you don't need an armful of system benchmarks to conclude that your PC is faster-you just need to sit at it for awhile.

My initial impressions for my new computer can be summed up in a single word: Wow!

Firstly, the display is nothing short of amazing when compared next to my old display. The monitor is extremely bright, crisp, and expansive both in size and resolution. I'm going to need to start finding software to help me set up and manage a window layout in order to make the best use of all the territory that is now in front of me.

Secondly, the computer is incredibly responsive and fast. In every aspect of use; boot time, opening up applications, working with browsers with dozens of open tabs, etc... I fired up my favorite game, Team Fortress 2 and used Chris's TF2 Configs to set all of the video details to maximum and run at my display's native resolution of 2560x1440. My frame rate was consistently in the 80+ range. Considering that within the last month I had to use one of the more basic configs to drop down the detail in order to keep my frame rate playable, this was astonishing to me. With the graphics details turned all the way up, the game looked and felt fantastic but remained completely playable. Despite TF2's relative old age, I can't remember ever being able to take one of my favorite video games and play it at maximum detail and have it feel enjoyable after this kind of an upgrade.

Now, the only problem with the Butt Dyno is that it is always subjective. Just about any recent computer is going to feel much better than my three-year-old PC. The butt dyno results are very encouraging but whether or not I achieved my goal of tripling my performance will also be determined by the benchmarks and comparisons to the results from the old PC.

Benchmarks

I was really excited to get the benchmarks running; for all benchmarks I used all the same settings from my previous benchmarks. The only exception is that I added an additional benchmark of the Crucial M4 SSD to see if there was any added benefit from the six extra cores I now have with regards to disk I/O.

Processor / GPU / System

I started off with my GPU benchmark first, because I knew it would be my smallest boost in performance. I had previously upgraded the video card in my machine roughly 12 to 18 months ago. Because of my budget, I wasn't able to triple the number of CUDA cores, so I had to settle with only doubling the number of available CUDA cores. I was expecting to see the least amount of improvement here. My original score was P8199. Running the same exact benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of P16902. Which was an increase of 206%.

Then I ran Geekbench; previously my old system had scored a 2847. After some whirring and clicking the new PC scored a respectable 10545, an increase of 370%, which was well past my goal of tripling overall performance.

I followed that up with the overall system benchmark, PCMark Vantage. Earlier, my old computer had scored 3671. Running the same benchmark on my new computer resulted in a score of 14228, an unexpected increase of 388%. I had expected the graphics component to weigh down the improvement just a tad, but the performance increases in other areas more than made up for it and nearly quadrupled my score.

Show:

Disk

Just like I was only expecting meager gains from the video card, I anticipated extraordinary gains beyond my goal moving from a platter drive up to a solid-state drive. I had some problems trying to run the same exact settings as before; specifically I had the benchmark create a file that 10 * the amount of system RAM to negate the benefits of caching. However, since I have 32 GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, clearly I would wind up creating a file much larger than the total capacity of the SSD. Furthermore, I was using the SSD as my primary storage, and after loading up all my apps, the SSD only had 85 GB free. What I decided to do was to limit the amount of RAM using Windows boot parameters. That way, I could bring total system RAM back down to 2GB and reproduce my prior benchmark settings.

The good news is that the SSD is many, many magnitudes superior than my old hard drive. The bad news is that it's SO much better, that I had a really difficult time getting to the data on a graph and have it make sense. We had to put three different y-axes on the graph in order for it to make the most amount of sense.

Basically, when running the same exact settings in IOMeter, Total I/Os Per Second increased from 405 to 36,512 (over 9000% improvement) and Total MBs/Second increased from 5.2 to 142.63 (over 2700% improvement). Overall, disk performance increased so far beyond my 300% goal that it's almost comical.

What I Could Have Done Differently

The two major problems drove up my price up by another $100.00 or so. Firstly, wanting to have 32GB of RAM forced me to upgrade my OS, which was a substantial unplanned expense. Secondly, I paid a premium to buy 1866MHz RAM that I have to run at 1333MHz because I filled up all 4 DIMM slots. Had I been a little more thorough in my shopping and research I would've chosen to do either of the following to try and under $1000 total:

1. Only buy 16GB of 1600MHz RAM: This would've saved me $90 on the Windows upgrade plus, around an additional $90 in the cost of the actual RAM. This would've put me well below my budget of $1000.
2. Buy 32GB of 1333MHz RAM: This only would've saved me $20-30 dollars total; I still would've had to pay for the upgrade to Windows 7 Home Professional

Conclusion

Ultimately, I hit one goal and missed the other. In almost every measurable regard my computer is at least three times as powerful as my prior computer. It literally runs circles around the old computer and as far as upgrades go, this is the one that stands out as the most impressive that I can remember.

The goal I failed on was the budgetary goal I set out for myself. And I'm more than satisfied missing out on that goal. I wanted to prove that for $1000 you could buy a very nice computer and display. By tweaking components a little bit and/or waiting for prices to fall over, time this is very attainable. I exceeded the $1000 mark, but that enabled me to buy a bigger SSD and get my new computer up to 32 GB of total system RAM. In the long run, these splurges will be well worth the money spent. Now, you'll have to excuse me. I have a hankering to play Team Fortress 2 at 2560x1440 with every video option set at the maximum setting.

As part of my computer upgrade, I decided my display could use an upgrade as well, and I budgeted in the neighborhood of $300 to spend on the monitor. The monitor that I currently have has been with me even longer than the PC that was being upgraded. I started browsing all the IPS displays I could find on Amazon and dug through lots of reviews.

Dual Head vs. Single Head

A long, long time ago. I bought two 17" CRT monitors off of some special deal for about the price of one and picked up a 2nd video card for my computer. That has to be around the worst-possible dual-head setup possible. The monitors were ginormous and occupied 110% of my available desk space; the desk even slightly buckled under their weight. Despite all the problems, I was hooked. I've had more than one display for quite awhile up until this computer. I was tempted to split my display budget in half and find the very best deal I could find on a monitor. There were a ton of monitors in my price range; in fact so many that it made digging through all the different brands and monitors a bit daunting.

The other choice would be to find the biggest & best display around $300 and continue to live a single monitor lifestyle. I've certainly grown accustomed to this, and I don't entirely mind it. A few months ago, one of my favorite bloggers wrote this great article about 27" 2560x1440 displays ordered directly from Korea. Comparable monitors obtained locally are still quite expensive compared to these displays. If you look at comprable "local" monitors on your various sites, they all seem to be starting in the $700 ballpark.

Ultimately, this was practically a coin flip. The cost and performance of the two smaller monitors actually nudges out (in my opinion) the bigger monitor by just a hair. If you can find two 1920x1080 IPS displays for about $300 then you get more pixels at a lesser price. On the other hand, when using two displays you have the bezels of the two monitors acting as a barrier between the two displays. And if you like to sit centered behind one monitor like I do then you incur significant diminishing returns on that second monitor, even more so if you're frequently doing things like playing games full screened like I tend to do.

Decision

In the end I decided I would focus on one monitor enough that I should go ahead and buy the biggest and baddest monitor my budget would allow. One of these Korean 27" 2560x1440 IPS displays lines up perfectly with what I'm trying to accomplish. There's no shortage of them listed on eBay and they all seem to be priced right around $300.00. Most of the sub-$300 were auction-style listings; because I'm famously impatient, I picked the cheapest "Buy it Now" listing I could find from a well-reviewed seller and ordered one for $319.90. Here's a link to the auction, and a screenshot if the listing expires.

The long and short of itm is that it's a no-frills 27" monitor with an IPS display and a gargantuan resolution of 2560x1440. The only drawback that I could think of was the lack of any other allowed inputs other than DVI-Dual. As far as I'm concerned that's not really much of a drawback at all, but it may inhibit some users out there. In worst-case scenario mode, I had some concerns about what might happen if the transaction went poorly. I also expected a tremendous amount of shipping time, but it was ordered on 12/22 and delivered by 12/27. In my opinion, that's nothing short of miraculous, considering there was a weekend and a holiday between the order and delivery. All in all, I'm pretty comfortable with the purchase and the decision. My only regret was not being able to afford one or two more of the monitors to set up a really expansive amount of display real estate.

So, at the the end of 2012 we decided to go ahead and buy a new computer. I had a pretty firm budget: $1300 total; $1000 for the computer and $300 for the monitor(s). My other goal in the upgrade was to improve system performance by at least three times. In my prior article, I took a bunch of benchmarks to gauge just how "fast" my current machine was.

Newegg vs. Amazon

If you've read prior articles, or you know me at all, then you know I'm a huge Newegg fan. I've bought parts from them for over the past decade. Not every part, just the majority of them. Recently, my friend Pat hooked us up with Amazon Prime. Because of the holidays, I was pretty excited to get free two day shipping on all of my computer parts. In doing my research, Amazon was cheaper on quite a few of the same components that I was looking at on Newegg. However, in the end it's probably a moot point, as Amazon is charging sales tax in Texas and that probably ended up eating up most of the items' price savings.

Meeting the "Upgrade" Requirement

In order to call it an upgrade, a few components need to carry on from the prior machine. In my case, there's not much worth carrying forward. Almost the video card, but I definitely want to upgrade that. The power supply I bought to drive that video card will definitely move forward, as will the hard disk drive for some additional storage. And finally, I'm going to use my Windows 7 license. As an additional bonus, I have a 2 TB hard drive that I've been using in an external enclosure that was made unnecessary by my FreeNAS box. I'll use as some storage as well.

CPU, RAM and Motherboard

I spent 95% of my research time agonizing over which direction to go-AMD vs Intel, which motherboard chipset and how much RAM. Well, the RAM part was easy, seeing as how I remember spending $400 of my hard-earned busboy money on a whopping 4MB of RAM into my first hand-me-down computer ages ago. I went ahead and decided to max out the RAM by buying 32GB of Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000) for $179.99

After pouring over pages of benchmarks and reviews of the latest AMD and Intel CPUs, I decided that I wanted 8 cores and that it seemed like AMD is giving the best bang-for-buck. In this case, I decided to go and pick up the AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition for $189.99.

I spent literally hours trying to decide between the AMD chipsets that support the AM3+ CPU. The 970, 990X and 990FX all seemed to be pretty equivalent for what I wanted to do. There's very little chance that I'll be doing SLI anytime in the near future, so most of the additional benefits of the 990X and 990FX are lost on me. However, in reading reviews on the various 970 boards, it seemed like support of the FX-8350 CPU was spotty; if you had an older revision of the board it required flashing the BIOS to get it to boot. Rather than risk buying something that was going to require me to jump through hoops, I looked at the 990X boards and found them to be marginally less expensive than the 990FX boards. For $137.99 I picked up a Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3, which definitely had all of the DIMM slots, 6.0Gb/s SATA ports and PCI Express x16 slots that I needed.

Budget remaining: $492.03

Videocard

My primary goal on buying a video card was to make sure to double the number of CUDA Cores currently available on my current Geforce GTX 460. In looking at the prices, that seemed to be the sweet-spot in my bang-for-buck calculations. I ended up deciding that the Geforce GTX 650 Ti seemed to be the right family of cards to be shopping in. Because my current card had 1 GB of video RAM, I decided to double that up as well by looking at video cards with 2GB of video RAM. For $169.99 I chose the EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB.

Budget remaining: $322.04

Storage

Storage is one of the areas in which I decided to splurge. I knew that I wanted an SSD, but I was leaning towards a smaller SSD to use for caching. But because prices have fallen down below $1 per gigabyte I decided to use an SSD as my primary storage device. Currently, I fluctuate around 200Gb of usage for everything installed on my PC and there's lots of fat to be trimmed out of there. Because of that, I felt that I could very easily buy a Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive to use as my primary storage. The SSD set me back $209.99

Budget Remaining: $112.05

Case

Because I was bringing over the power supply from my prior computer, I only needed a shell of a case. The budget was starting to feel a little bit tight, so I employed a friend and Google to search for the best "budget" case with a slew of internal hard drive bays and that would fit my motherboard. For $39.99 I found a NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black) which seemed to fit the bill.

Budget Remaining: $72.06

Odds and Ends

The CPU I bought didn't include a cooler, so I picked up a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus for $24.71. Because I picked Amazon, I thought it made sense to go ahead and include sales tax to my bottom line which came in at $76.54

Budget Remaining: $-29.19

The Fine Print

I didn't quite make my $1000 budget. There's certainly a bit of fat that I could trim from the computer; a less expensive motherboard, slower RAM, and a smaller SSD all jump out at me as items that could've been less expensive, saving me quite a few dollars. However, I had another goal of tripling my existing system performance, and ultimately that wound up being more important to me than a small overage on the budget. Besides, there's got to be at least a hundred dollars of "old" parts which are coming over from the upgraded computer. If I really wanted it to look like I stayed inside my budget, I'd find a way to give myself credit for those pieces.

Complete Parts List

• AMD FX-8350 FX-Series Black edition
• Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD3
• Corsair Vengeance (4x8GB) DDR3 1866 MHZ (PC3 15000)
• EVGA GeForce GTX 650 Ti 2048MB
• Crucial m4 256GB 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive
• NZXT Technologies Source 210 Computer Case (Black)
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
• Antec 500W Power Supply (from previous computer)
• Seagate Barracuda 500GB Hard Drive (from previous computer)
• Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive (random unused hard drive hanging around)

The other day, my father called me up and wanted to talk computers. He's been looking into upgrading his monitor; unfortunately for him his computer is pretty old. To get up to the resolutions he was wanting he was going to at least have to buy a video card. Once you tip that first domino, all the rest come falling back behind it; after some suggestions, Dad decided it's probably best to be looking at a new PC.

That got me thinking just exactly how old was my PC? It has been showing its age from time to time recently seeming to lack some oomph and occasionally locking up. It had seemed like quite awhile since I purchased it, and when I made the purchase, this PC was at the very, very, low end of what was available. I bought this PC from Dell because I couldn't beat the deals that they were offering if I tried to do it myself. I logged into Dell's small business website-the deals are always better there-and tried to find my order date to no avail because you can only go back two years on their website. After some digging, poking, and prodding, I ultimately discovered that my PC had been purchased and shipped in November of 2009.

Up until the beginning of 2012, I thought my do-it-yourself computer days were behind me. Firstly, I never thought I'd be buying another desktop; laptop computers' video capabilities had gotten to the point where I could do everything I was doing on a laptop that I was doing on a desktop at right around the price point I like to shop at. Secondly, with places like Woot, dealspl.us, and the like, there always seemed to be some PCs out there with better sale prices than if I built it myself. However, during 2012 I bought a Nexus 7 a fantastic device that meets almost every one of my mobile computing needs.

Because of the Nexus 7, I decided to build a price-conscious yet beefy desktop. After some serious negotiations with my wife, we set a budget for $1000 for the PC, and for good measure I budgeted an additional $300 for new display(s), since my current monitor has been with me since before this PC.

The Old PC

My current PC is a Dell Studio 540. It has an Intel E5300 running at 2.6 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, and a 500 gig platter hard drive. I upgraded the video card to a nVidia Geforce GTX 460 quite a long time ago, and because of the video card's power requirements I also upgraded the computer's power supply. It's actually been a decent little computer.

Benchmarks

As a starting point, I decided to run a variety of benchmarks on the computer. I wanted an overall System benchmark, 3D benchmark and an I/O Benchmark in order to measure the amount of upgrade. For my benchmarks, I chose: Geekbench, 3DMark Vantage, PCMark Vantage and Iometer.

PCMark

I picked PCMark Vantage as an overall system benchmark. The initial score was 3671. Just for full disclosure, I had to edit this screenshot to make all of the information fit in my blog's template nicely.

3DMark

For video performance, I measured my performance in 3DMark Vantage. I decided to go ahead and run the benchmark with the performance settings. My system scored a P8199.

Geekbench

To get an idea of how my CPU was performing, I ran a benchmark using Geekbench. My computer scored 2847.

Iometer

For my hard drive benchmark, I used IOMeter's "all-in-one" tests and a test file that was 20GB (Total System RAM * 10) and two worker processes. I measured 405.69 in Total I/Os per second, 5.2 in Total MB per second and an Average I/O Response Time of 2.4636ms.

Objectives

My objective is to overall triple my performance of this PC while staying within my budget. In the initial research achieving the goal is pretty simple; the difficult task is to do it within the $1000 budget that I set for myself. I didn't really look at any other computer benchmarks out there, since I know that my computer is quite on the low end. The purpose of these benchmarks is to establish a baseline to compare my new computer with.

Up Next

I've already done the research and ordered my new hardware. I plan to break the hardware up into a couple articles: one for the computer, and another for the display which is turning out to be the most interesting story in this upgrade. As I have time over the Holidays, I'll assemble the PC and do some writing.