So, I did it...

[V_R]

I know that some of you here have your own opinions on Win 8 and such, so the flame proof jacket is on!

Upgraded my PC and now running Windows 8.1 64 bit on a 500Gb Samsung Evo. It flies. This thing is a beast, yet near silent and runs nice and cool too.

Everything went well, the sound card was a little bit of an issue as Creative haven't actually got an official 8.1 driver out yet, end of the month they say.... So am running the PAX modded drivers, sorted.

Upgraded specs are....

- Intel Core i7-4770K 3.50GHz (Haswell) running at 4.4Ghz cooled by a Corsair H80i.
- 16Gb TeamGroup Vulcan ORANGE 2133Mhz RAM
- Gigabyte Z87X-OC Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard
- Samsung EVO 500Gb SATA 6Gb/s SSD
- Corsair Carbide 300R Case, I replaced the front single 140mm fan with two AF140 white LED's.
- Windows 8.1 64 Bit

Reused from my old system...

- EVGA GeForce GTX 780 ACX FTW Graphics Card
- Creative X-Fi Titanium HD Sound Card
- Mechanical hard drives for storage and media
- Corsair HX 850w Modular PSU
- Samsung SH-B123L/BSBP BluRay Drive


Anyway, the finished product, still needs a little tidy up with the cables and stuff. Might get some orange braided power and PCI-E cables to match the accents of the board.

 

[TriplexDread]

Nice been thinking about water cooling myself in past
Then thought i've no intention of oc'ing and system runs fine and is quiet on stock air cooled HSF

If I ever went SLI again I may consider it, probably only for the cards though not CPU

Out of Curiosity how you pay for that 500gb ssd?

 

[V_R]

Amazon, was originally going to get the 250, but my old 'Data/Programs' drive is knocking on a bit, think it was only Sata II maybe even older than that....

So i decided to ditch it and get a big SSD for programs and OS, got BF4 on it, but Steam and my media/docs etc both have their own drives still. WD Caviar blacks.

 

[Ian]

That is one hell of a nice system . Do you notice much of a difference compared to your old system, as that was hardly a slouch!

Looks really tidy too - nice job . How are the temps looking and have you tried pushing it any further?

 

[Becky]

Ooh it looks great! I do like to see nice tidy cables

 

[floppybootstomp]

It's clean!

Great system

But there's just one thing wrong with it.

Just the one, er...

 

[CSB]

Very Nice V_R, love the SSD and cooler, want to swap??? haha

errrrr yeah I noticed it too, just the one as Flops says ............. shall we tell him???

 

[V_R]

That is one hell of a nice system . Do you notice much of a difference compared to your old system, as that was hardly a slouch!

Looks really tidy too - nice job . How are the temps looking and have you tried pushing it any further?

Yeah its faster than the old one, BF4 is noticeably smoother, higher frame rate etc. General use is faster, the SSD is just ridiculously fast! Installing and opening programs is near instant. Even something like Photoshop CS6 loads in a second. Boot times and reboot times are silly fast, and that's after I've disabled fast boot.

I'm still not fully happy with the cables, want them tidier if I can! There is a SATA power cable at the back that you can see that i want to hide... My OCD hates it...!

Might get some of these - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BU-006-BX&groupid=701&catid=1428&subcat=2659

Will give me a bit more cable to play with and look a lot nicer.

Temps are looking good too, idles at about 30 give or take, seems to hit about 60-65 when gaming I think, haven't really looked tbh. I know its a Costa Rica made chip which apparently are better than the Malaysian ones. Who knew eh? lol

Seems to be good on Vcore too...

Thanks Bex, Yep, me too.

It's clean!

Great system

But there's just one thing wrong with it.

Just the one, er...

Very Nice V_R, love the SSD and cooler, want to swap??? haha

errrrr yeah I noticed it too, just the one as Flops says ............. shall we tell him???

Whats that then!?


On a side note, Had to move the sound card down to the bottom PCI-E slot as it was causing the 780 to run only at x8, Only noticed it when i checked GPUZ!

 

[Taffycat]

That looks a very impressive set-up V_R, great job.

So, the hardware is clearly excellent, but I would love to know your impressions of Win8 so far? Any yearnings for Win7? Or is 8 looking any friendlier now?

 

[V_R]

Well my GF's laptop is Win8 so i've got to play with it for a while now, its actually not that bad. It is faster than Win7.

I wanted win8 for the performance, I've got the hardware so i want to make the most of it.

Obviously the Metro UI is crap, and IMO it should be an option when you install/setup Win8, Or maybe you should be able to remove it like how you can with some features via control panel. But like i said, install Classic Shell, tell it to disable the charms and active corners etc and boot straight to desktop and I never see it unless i want to.

Win 8 doesn't need much tweaking with regards to SSD's, it will defrag mech drives and run trim on SSD's, which is nice.

Other than that I cant really say its much different, once you get into it, its actually much the same as 7, aside from some minor UI changes.

 

[muckshifter]

Win 8 doesn't need much tweaking with regards to SSD's, it will defrag mech drives and run trim on SSD's, which is nice.

just for an info, Win 7 also 'auto-defrags' (TRIMs) SSDs ... Vista does not.


if you want to check to make sure do this:

open a command prompt using administers rights ...


Command prompt > fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

you will see one of the following

DisableDeleteNotify = 1 (Windows TRIM commands are disabled)
DisableDeleteNotify = 0 (Windows TRIM commands are enabled)

 

[V_R]

Ah see, 7 and 8 are almost the same.

I do remember reading that somewhere actually, probably one of the things i did on install and promptly forgot about.

 

[Quadophile]

That is one clean looking machine there V_R!

I am very impressed with the hardware choice, I just love the looks of the motherboard, I have not built any rig since I moved to US so things have changed/ improved in that department.

Enjoy your new rig

 

[bootneck02]

Great looking pc VR, enjoy

 

[Abarbarian]

Nice looking job you done there. That ssd is seriously fast.

Just out of interest what is your boot time ?

 

[V_R]

I dont know, i haven't timed it, but it seems to take longer for the MB to run though its POST than to boot windows.

 

[Abarbarian]

Was just curious as to how W8 played. Boot time gives a vague idea of how the system runs.
I just installed me Arch on a small 60 GB Kingston V300 and I boot in 18 seconds not that much faster than me F3.
I could probably cut that time in half with some tweaking btu as I am doing a fresh install soon I will wait till then.Some folk I know boot in 5 or 7 seconds but they both have better hardware than me.
I still have an install on the F3 and did some work in the Gimp and the ssd was way faster as is the rest of working.
My grey cell probably would not be able to keep up if I could get a ssd like yours.

 

[EvanDavis]

Boot time gives a vague idea of how the system runs.

Dunno how you quite figure that one out. My Acer 5520 W7 Ultimate boots to usable desktop in about 40 seconds but isn't the best of machines when running. Browsing is about all that it is good at.

 

[Abarbarian]

Dunno how you quite figure that one out. My Acer 5520 W7 Ultimate boots to usable desktop in about 40 seconds but isn't the best of machines when running. Browsing is about all that it is good at.

Just a rule of thumb based on experience. Slow boot up equals slow running pc in my experience.
If you do not have a need for any Windows programs it seems your laptop works very well with various linux distros.

http://www.linlap.com/acer_aspire_5520

Appologies V_R for hijacking your thread.