Dark Rage, my current gaming rig is well underway. Recently I bought a new pair of RAMs from G.skill, the G.skill Trident LED RGB 16GB RAM. I bought the 3000mhz version from Newegg, and within days, it arrived at my doorstep. Installing it was easy but tricky at times because I didn’t have enough room in the case to align the new ones in. I had to go blind and hoped that the RAMs aligned perfectly. I simply remove the old RAMs (incidentally also from G.skill but the Ripjaws series, in red) and then snap the new ones in.
Then it was time to switch the PC on. Good lord the LED RGB strips lining the entire length of the RAMs was bright, colourful and glorious! One thing that stood out was how bright these individual LED diodes can emit! I could literally switch off the NZXT Hue+ LED strips lined along the edge of my case and the light from the RAM is enough to softly illuminate the PC’s internals. Overall, it was gorgeous! Why didn’t I make the plunge earlier?
The decision to upgrade my PC’s RAMs was a purely for aesthetic reasons. My old RAMs were working fine, but I decided to upgrade them to add more bling to my build. The RAMs were not cheap. RAM prices have spiked in recent months. In fact, the old RAM costs 140 bucks at the moment I bought it last year. These new ones came in at about 240 bucks. We are talking about a 100 dollar price premium over last year’s price. However there are exceptions. For one, its LED RGB, so naturally, these RAMs that I bought would definitely cost more. Secondly, the new ones are running at 3000mhz rather than 2400mhz from the old ones. So the price difference between these two pair of RAMs are not purely attributed to the global supply shortage of RAMs chips, but also having premium features not found on the old one.
Not that it matters much buying a 3000hmz RAMs, since my current motherboard can only support at RAM speeds of up to 2133hmz. I bought the faster RAMs because I initially wanted to upgrade my CPU and motherboard as well to a Ryzen system. But at the very last minute, I decided to wait out on my purchase and wait for Ryzen Zen 2 CPU architecture to launch (sometime in the second half of 2018). I have a lot of thought of whether it would be worth upgrading my CPU now but decided against it. My current i5 6500 CPU still have the muscle to perform admirably when it comes primarily in gaming. And since my rig is a gaming rig first and foremost, I don’t really need an 8 core/ 16 thread CPU just yet. I’ll let the Ryzen series chips mature a little bit more before making the plunge.
So RAM upgrades have been completed, CPU and motherboard upgrades are put on hold. I’m only left with my graphics card.
A friend of mine decided to buy my EVGA GTX 1070 FTW card for $450. I was not warm to the idea at first since I had to plans to upgrade them. But after much consideration, I was like; why the hell not? I am in the process of upgrading my rig. And since I have decided not to upgrade my CPU and motherboard (since real-life performance improvement would not immediately be felt) I thought that upgrading the GPU might be a better choice. The performance upgrades would be substantial, and at this point of time, there have been no plans for Nvidia to release a new line of GPU anytime soon. A GTX 1080ti would be a sweet upgrade. A sweet but overkill upgrade, since I only game at 1440p. My current 1070 can do the job just fine at 60fps ultra settings. Maybe not just everything at ultra, especially in current and potential future games. So to get ahead of the curve, 1080ti would be a great investment. Now I don’t have to worry about not being able to play any games at ultra settings 60fps. I know a 1080ti would devour everything I throw at it.
My EVGA GTX 1080ti FTW3 is on the way. Due to arrive on Monday, I am very excited for the moment to arrive where I will be installing the new graphics card in my rig.
After this final installation, my gaming rig upgrade will be complete and it will be Dark Rage V2.
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