Upgrade plans for my desktop PC

The Small Form Factor PC that I built last year is quite fast for almost all the things I do with it. But I love upgrading my PC just to experience what the latest and the greatest hardware has to offer. Sadly, things do not usually live up to my expectations, but that is a different story.

This story is about the potential upgrade path this particular PC offers.

Sadly, my options aren't vivid. The PC is built in such a way that a tangible increase in performance requires a substantial amount of spending, which sometimes defies the reasoning behind "building" a desktop PC.

Let me explain.

Video card

Let's look at the video card first, because as you probably know, I am a gamer. The video card is the most important component in a gaming PC. But, I am not the typical gamer you would find elsewhere, but that is for another discussion.

Right now, I have an overclocked MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G in my PC. To see a tangible increase in performance, I have to at least get a GTX 1070 and overclock it, which would give me 50% performance gains over my current card. But it would cost me close to $700 if I want to buy locally. $100 or so cheaper if I buy it from outside Australia, but it will make claiming for warranty painful. The GTX 1080 would give me twice the performance but it would cost me a whopping $1000 if bought locally! I am not going to spend that sort of money on a single piece of computer hardware, probably ever! But the GTX 1080 can be bought for less than $900 if I look to import it from outside.

Finally did the PSU upgrade: Silverstone SX500-LG

 

I was delaying purchasing of the new PSU  until I could find it at a reasonable price and until I piled up enough Rakuten points. By 15th of this month, I had a total of 3700 points and sadly about 1500 points were to become expired at the end of the month. So I had to buy something else with that points or buy the PSU now.

 

I was going to buy either the Silverstone SX500-LG or the Sharkoon SilentStorm SFX Gold 500W model. I was leaning towards the latter because it was

• cheaper (much cheaper on Rakuten, like JPY2,500 compared to the Silverstone),
• had more connectors on the SATA power cable (4 vs. 3) and
• had a fan that was always running (compared to semi-silent one on the Silverstone).

But the Silverstone one

• had all Japanese caps,
• had shorter power cables and
• was from a well-known manufacturer (not OEM, mind you) in the field of PSUs.

 

But I decided to wait a bit longer to see if the Silverstone unit would drop in price. I could wait till the end of the month anyways. One day I noticed that there was a new listing for less than JPY14,000 on Rakuten, by a shop called EC-JOY!. Still it was almost a thousand bucks pricier than the Sharkoon unit, but I would trade that amount for peace of mind. (I’ve been burned several times for cheeping out on stuff.) So I decided to go for the Silverstone. I have seen EC-JPY!’s listings on Kakaku.com but I had never bought anything from them.

 

It was mentioned that the delivery charges weren't included in the price but it turned out to be free after all. I ordered it on Thursday the 17th and it arrived on Saturday the 19th. It could have taken longer because of the holidays. (This is the Silver Week in Japan.) It was no one day delivery like Amazon Prime, but I’ve purchases from Rakuten take more than a week.

 

Finished the first stage of the SG13 build.

I managed to transfer the components to the SG13 case on last Saturday morning while everyone else was asleep.

It took me about 2 hours to get it up and running. The most difficult part was managing the cables with my 150mm PSU. If it was an SFX PSU or even an SFX-L PSU, I would have enough room. The cables were also quite too long for this build.

Installing the HDD with all those cables was also quite a task. It is very tight in there.

Other photos

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