The Old Faithful

As an employee, I have a perfectly good work laptop and so do not rely on my own home setup for work beyond having a good internet connection, so whilst I have 'wanted' to update my aging home PC for a while now (years) I just couldn't really justify it as it is mainly used for browsing and email.

I do have Visual Studio installed on it and do use it from time to time and whilst it can be a painful experience I tolerated it...but it has gotten to the point where I just can't put it off much longer - so it's time bite the bullet and upgrade the old faithful.

For reference my old PC is a i5 2500K (3.3Ghz, 4 Core, 4 Logical) from 2011, so well over 10 years old now, 8GB RAM (yep, just 8) sitting in a Gigabyte Z68XP-UD3 motherboard.

What Do I Want (Analysis Paralysis)

I don't like using laptops, although I can't deny they are more portable than a desktop/case. I use a laptop 'like a desktop', in that I plug an actual keyboard and mouse into it and plug it into a proper monitor. For my home PC I dont need it to be portable so it will be a desktop (or rather a midi case) based setup.

I went round and round and round, in analysis paralysis on most of the setup with HUGE chunks of time being spent on trying to decide the monitor and case (I don't want a Christmas Tree for a PC, so no RGB thanks and no 'Window' to admire it through - apart from 'why'?, its just asking to get broken). The rest, by comparison was much easier, but still took me an age.

Decision Made

I purchased the monitor a few months ago and a new office chair a month ago and the rest of it I ordered today. I'll dip into why I chose what I chose below, but here is what I settled on:

• Chair: Boulies Master Series (Fabric, Blue)

• Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2723QE (4K, USB Hub, Powered USB-C and KVM)

• Motherboard: MSI Pro Z790-A Wifi DDR4

• CPU: i5 14600K (3.5GHz-5.4GHz, 14 Cores, 6 Performance, 8 Efficient, 20MB L2, 125W, Intel UDH Graphics 770)

• CPU Cooler: DeepCool AK620 (6 Copper Pipes, Dual 120mm Fans)

• RAM: Corsair Vengence LPX 64GB (2x32GB, 3600MHz, C18)

• SSD: Crucial T500 2TB (PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD)

• Case: Antec P10C (Midi Case, Solid Side, NO RGB, 1 x 5.25 External Bay, 4 120mm Fans)

• PSU: Corsair RM850x (2021, ATX, Fully Modular)

Notably I did not get a GPU. I intend to make use of the CPU built in Intel UDH Graphics 770. I am a PC gamer at heart, but just don't get the time. I have an XBox Series X gathering dust too.

Chair

Chair: Boulies Master Series (Fabric, Blue)

I wanted a good quality new chair but they don't come cheap. I didn't want a leather (pretent leather) one as I'll probably melt into a puddle during the summer in it (south facing office) so fabric it is.

Initially I settled on Nitro Concepts S300 Gaming Chair in Horizon Orange. I was mainly drawn by the colour, and bought it from AWD-IT for £249.99. Short story, I returned it. It was faulty and on top of that it really wasn't the quality I was expecting. The seat itself was huge (width) and when I sat on it the material all gathered at the front of the seat. The wheel legs were plastic and it just didn't exude 'quality'. The fault however was that the seat height would not stay as set - probably a bad hydraulic gas cylinder.

I then went for Boulies Master Series in blue fabric, buying this direct from Boulies for £309.99. Unlike the Nitro Concepts, this felt like quality from the start. The wheel legs were black aluminium, the material didn't pucker and even the arms has chrome aluminium adjustments. All this said, assembly did not go well. It arrived with broken plastic parts and the tilt mechanism ended up being replaced 3 times! - as the chair itself, once assembled, leant slightly to one side. I would however say that Boulies customer service was exellent. Parts were sent immediately without and attempt to wriggle out of any obligation they might have. it was all handled over chat and they were great, but it did take about 3 weeks of waiting on parts before I finally had a chair that was correct and could finally get rid of the old chair and all the packahing this new one came in.

I do really like my chair. The quality control could have been better, but good customer support rescued that.

Monitor

Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2723QE (4K, USB Hub, Powered USB-C and KVM)

Initially I felt I really wanted an ultrawide monitor. I am not looking to play games on it, so its more for productivity and being a developer, having more real estate would be really handy (My current monitor was a Dell, but only 25" and 1440 16:9).

Ultrawides are not cheap, so it was going to be 1440 again, and probably 34", so dimenstionally it would be similar in size to my current monitor, but just wider.

I was mainly dithering over whether the extra real estate (width) would be very usable as I spend most my time in Teams and sharing my screen over Teams. I like to share my screen and not an application so I can switch between apps eaily whilst sharing and when sharing wider monitors with other who are on normal 16:9 monitor, they get a letter box experience. I could probably share the app instead, but that would be painful for me to do and probably there would be some docking software that might alleviate the pain, but in the end I bottled it and instead got a Dell UltraSharp U2723QE 4K 27" monitor for £489.97 from Amazon. I get the feeling of more real estate being a higher resolution, yet dimensionally compatible when sharing over Teams.

I chose this monitor, other that feeling it was a good quality4K monitor, for some particular features:

• Powered USB-C and Built in USB Hub

• Built in KVM

The combination enabled me to completely get rid of my work laptop docking station and all cabling, so now my laptop has a single USB-C cable to the montor and that's it. The laptop is powered/charged by the USB-C cable and the mouse, keyboard, webcam and headset allplug into the monitor. I can then switch to my home PC and get full use of all those peripherals seemlessly - nice.

I either use one or the other (work or home PC) but a nice feature should you need it, is that you can have the 2 PCs side by side or picture in picture (PiP) on the monitor, if you need to observe and use them both at the same time.

The monitor doesn't have built in sound, but I bought the add-on Dell Slim Soundbar SB521A to solve that. Courtesy of a voucher I got this for £33.24. Its a bit tinny, so if you what more than just some sound from windows then you'll want something better. Its good enough for my needs. I was mainly drawn by the fact it it powered by USB and magnetically clips to the bottom of the monitor, so no additional plugs and cabling makes for a tidy solution.

Motherboard

Motherboard: MSI Pro Z790-A Wifi DDR4

I am an 'Intel' guy and so AMD were never uin the running for the CPU but I flip-flopped a bit between DDR4 vs DDR5. DDR5 is now probably the right choice, but if I was going down the DDR5 route I would also want to go for the better PCIe 5 SSD too and probably want a board with internal USB-C Gen 2x2 for the front of the case - and those choices increases the whole rig by about £400, so in the end I decides to stick to DDR4 and PCIe 4 SSD.

Once that was decided, the deicision was reasonably easy. I like MSI boards and built a PC for my daughter last year using more or less this one, except I went for the newer Z790 chipset version.

The features of this board that I was mainly looking for were support for a front USB-C, 14th Gen intel CPUs, HDMI 2.1/DisplayPort 1.4 and multiple SSD slots, as I have no plans to use 'legacy' HDD. The one 'legacy' item I still want is a 5.25" DVD read/writer mounted in the case.

I bought this from Novatech for £195.97, including shipping. This board seemed to be in short supply when I wanted it so I didnt have a lot of options from where to buy it from. There's nothing wrong with Novatech that I know of, but I havent used them in years and would of gone elsewhere as fuirst choice.

CPU

CPU: i5 14600K (3.5GHz-5.4GHz, 14 Cores, 6 Performance, 8 Efficient, 20MB L2, 125W, Intel UDH Graphics 770)

I was flip plopping between the last generation i5 13500 and the current generation 14600K. Price wise the 13500 was about £240 whereas the 14600K was about £300, however the 13500 comes with a cooler in the box, so the 14600K would need an additional cooler. In the end I decided that I don't upgrade very often and "sod it", I'll go big and get the current generation. I bought the CPU from Amazon for £299.00.

Cooler

CPU Cooler: DeepCool AK620 (6 Copper Pipes, Dual 120mm Fans)

For the cooler that I now needed to buy, I went for a DeepCool AK620. I wanted to get the "Zero Dark" one but it seemed to be out of stock on most places and where it was in stock cost about £65. SO I bought the 'plain' AK620, which is identically functionally, just not all black in colour, from Amazon, who were offering a voucher for 15% off, for just £50.99.

I went with this cooler as it wasn't stupidly expensive, reviews suggested that for a air cooler it did a good job and it was fairly quiet. I mainly want a quiet PC.

RAM

RAM: Corsair Vengence LPX 64GB (2x32GB, 3600MHz, C18)

This was a much easier choice for me. I have bought Corsair before and they are good value for money and reliable. I don't overclock as a rule, but with 'automatic overclocking' supported by XMP 2.0 on the board, this is an area I can tweak a little bit so went for 3600MHz rather than the stock 3200MHz. I probably won't need 64GB of RAM, but what the heck, it doesn't cost much really.

I bought Corsair Vengence LPX 64GB (2 x 32GB) C18 direct from Corsair for £124.99.

SSD

SSD: Crucial T500 2TB (PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2 SSD)

I wouldn't even consider HDD anymore, so it was always going to be SSD, specifically PCIe Gen4 NVMe M.2. I was mainly looking at 2TB or either Crucial P5 Plus or Samsung 990 Pro. The Samsung is a bit faster but it is also quite a bit more expensive so I have decided to get the Crucial P5 Plus, however everywhere seemed to be out of stock and where I could get it from was really expensive.

After some digging around I found out that the Crucial P5 Plus has been discontinued and replaced with the Crucial T500. Had I of gone for the DDR5 PCIe 5 motherboard I would have bought the T700, but as already explained, that just made it too expensive an upgrade for my taste. I bought the Crucial T500 2TB from Amazon for £134.99.

Case

Case: Antec P10C (Midi Case, Solid Side, NO RGB, 1 x 5.25 External Bay, 4 120mm Fans)

I probably dithered over the case for the most time. I watched a LOT of reviews predominantly on youtube channel Gamers Nexus, who do a really good and thorough job of testing the cases. The main presenter is a pleasure to watch, and his hair...fabulous.

Where I have my case (on the floor, side against the table) means that even if I had RGB and a glass side, I wouldn't see it anyway - but I just don't get why anyone would want to light up their room with rainbow LEDs and look inside their case whilst its running. However, if I did I would probably have bought the Lian Li LanCool 216 (see the Gamers Nexus review). It has excellent thermals and its a good price. Given I dont want the RGB or glass side I has more or less settled on the Fractal Design Torrent for its thermals but I do favour a quiet case and have no immediate plans to even buy a GPU. The Torrent also didn't support a 5.25" external DVD, so in the end I went for the Antec P10C.

It was quite hard to source this case and it seemed to be out of stock in most places, or overpriced, so I bought this from NeoComputers for £92.00 (including delivery). I had never heard of this company before, but so far excellent service. The payment went wrong (browser error my end) and the order got stuck and even though they were shut until the new year, I sent an email and they had a skeleton support team on standby (this is Saturday evening, 30th December) and they responded within the hour and fixed it.

I chose the case mainly for its quietness, but it has pretty good thermals compared to most cases that are going for the quiet angle. In the event I do get a GPU and the case causes any throttling, the door can be opened for those rare occasions I might need better thermals. This case specifically won over because it supported an external 5.25 DVD bay as I have not moved on yet from wanted a DVD reader/writer mounted in the case.

PSU

PSU: Corsair RM850x (2021, ATX, Fully Modular)

Corsair are a reliable brand and make good PSUs, so I didnt dither too much here. I did read around the various variants (RMx, RMe, RMx SHIFT) and decided the RMx, whicst an older model than RMe, was better quality and comes wuith 10 years warranty so went for the 2021 version of Corsair RM850x. This, over the 2018 model, has improved magnetic bearings, so should be quieter and generally better and comes with the Japanese capacitors, which alledgely are better quality than the chinese ones used int he RMe model. I chose 850W so that adding a GPU later will be possible.

I bought the Corsair RM850x from CCL, who had a 10% off voucher, for £113.39.

Summary

I have not yet put this together. All the parts should come this week so I may post back with my experience with the parts and the various retailers.

All in all, including the chair and monitor which I bought earlier in the year, the total cost of my new setup came to £1,801.29, although the PC itself (excluding the monitor) was only £1001.33, as broken down below: