It's normally a four pin but I guess those newer motherboards need more power through that particular connection. The split cable would be to allow for connecting to 4 pins MBs, so yes, together they would be the 8pin for that socket.

So I powered on (in the middle of a thunderstorm) without the graphics card and everything seemed to work, then it tried to load Windows and had a massive donk. Windows is now running repairs, and has been for five minutes.

Once that gets sorted (fingers crossed) I'll try putting the card in.

Soo tempted to go the über PC route myself but every time I say to myself I will do it I read an article/forum like this and get cold feet. Plus it never works out as cheap as people make out. If I was going to go down the pg gaming road I want to go full out and not just gave a machine that "should" handle "most" stuff ok.
How über is Mods and what was the final cost (sans monitor)?

So I think I've finished fiddling -or more accurately updating- for now. It saved me £140 ish quid but I probably should have bought a fresh HDD/SDD and OS. Annoyingly I've just found out you can get a clean image and use the OEM product key. Maybe I'll do that when I plunge for an SSD.

Apart from making the odd mistake like forgetting to put the back IO cover on, connecting fan wires to wrong points (but realising shortly after what I'd done wrong) and getting completely bamboozled by connecting the power to the graphics card it more or less went without a hitch.

Everything seems to be running fine. I swapped the TVs between the lounge and my room so it's now running on a 1080p set for games and mirrored to a higher res 22" monitor for work.

I realised I don't actually have any PC games, other than The Orange Box. So I downloaded HL2 again, stuck eveything up to max and it looked lovely.. in a 2004 kinda way.

Decided this was no good, and I didn't fancy playing HL2 again so downloaded the demo of Arkham City. Matched the resolution to 1080 turned DX11 bits on and shoved everything up to the maximum thinking if it didn't run nice I'd just work backwards turning stuff down/off till it did run nice like I'd always done with PC games before.

Holy fuck, it was like someone did a sex wee in my eyeballs. Looked goegeous without (noticably at least) dropping frames or tearing. Tried to take a print screen but it only grabbed the title screen for some reason.

As a bonus even with the stock Intel fan the record says it never went over 40c. Seems odd it would hit that and go not a percentage point further but hey. Forgot to check what the card was reporting, will do next time.

Needless to say I'm one very happy bunny right now.

So a huge, huge thank you to everyone that offered advice whilst working out what to do. Thanks for being patient.

Anyone doing similar shout and I'll do my best to write up a more detailed how to (as if I'm some kind of expert now).

Paul the sparky wrote:

I read most of this thread, but I understood less than half of what was going on. PC gaming isn't for me.

Ha. Try trying to work it out because you've got to a) buy expensive bits of electronics and then b) piece it all together.

It's actually not that difficult, really. The basic components haven't changed since forever you just have to get a fair grasp on what the specific technologies within them do.

Mod - I'm going to be doing this over the next few weeks. If you could post costings, that'd be useful.

Reg, I dunno if this helps, probably not much, but here's the innards.

I think you should now indulge in some pimping, for continuation's sake.

Looking good!

Depending on the PSU, he might not need an adapter as some come with 2 of the required cables. Since his PSU is modular i'm guessing this is one of them and the adapter will not be necessary.

edit: never mind, done a search and appears it's '1 x 6+2pin PCI-E Power' so will be necessary after all.

Nice PC mrsmr2 btw!

@mrsmr2

I noticed this on the SCAN website for your PSU:

**Please NOTE: does not include power cord and modular cables**

Have you also ordered the modular cables? If not looks like you might need to.

Modular just means the cables are detachable from the PSU so you don't have a bunch of wires in there that you don't need, makes it nice and tidy and improves air flow.

They don't do 12 pin cables, but some PSUs do have 2x6 pin (or 1 six pin + 1 8 pin which can double as a second six pin - ATI cards generally need an 8 pin + 6 pin PCI-e).

I build my own PC earlier on this year and pretty much followed the rule of thumb as displayed in this thread:

i5 3500 OC'd to about 5000
GTX 560i
8GB of RAM
etc

The one thing I didnt do is get any additional hard drives and simply inserted my old 500GB and 1TB drives into the new case. As a result, I've got pretty poor SATA drives running at 5400RPM and they seem to be the one thing that gives me a poor Windows Performance Score (a game in itself!)

Plus, I'm running out of room on all my drives.

So, the question:

1. How easy is it to install a SSD and Windows without the need for any tomfoolery? I dont want to have to fuck around with duplication of Operating Systems. I just want to install the drive, have Windows install or copied and have no other issues.

Is this at all possible?

Tempy wrote:

For all those who have bought new PCs, my friend just built one with an 8 core processer, that is about 4-6 too many cores.

]

It's about four too many today - but will at least allow him a few more years out of the processor.

Tempy wrote:

Tech bragging really.

Totes.

Where is this friend from?

THE FUTURE!?!?!