I built a new computer lolz, also bitcoin

[peeeeeeet]

It has been about five years since my last build. I was going to build one earlier this year but decided that my present system was fine. But then the whole BitcoinCash pallaver happened and I sold the shitcoins for £££££. Coinfloor wasn't planning on supporting BCH because they're not stupid, but then they did realise it meant free money for other people who weren't stupid. Anyway, if you care about the Bitcoin world, miners are currently trying to game the system by switching hashpower back and forth between the two chains which means some days BCH finds a block every minute or so (it's supposed to be every ten) and other times several hours will go by without block findery. SO COMPETENT. This is because they added an emergency difficulty adjustment mechanism before the hard fork but didn't bother to test it or peer review it or any of those things. Anyway let us hope BCH dies in a fire soon.

Meanwhile on proper Bitcoin we activated Segwit, which is this technical thing that I'm not going to explain, even though I could if I wanted to. Segwit was extensively tested and peer reviewed, and appears to work fine. INTERESTING. There is supposedly another hard fork happening in November to double the blocksize, but I suspect it won't go ahead. If it does, MORE FREE MONEY, although it's likely to be a more contentious fork this time, especially if Segwit doesn't kept the mempool small like it promises. There is an ongoing spam attack to clog up the mempool to force larger block sizes of one sort or another. I guess we shall see.

ANYWAY what is my new computer? Here are some things about it:

Case

I got something called Gamemax silent white. It is probably my favourite case ever and I have had some nice ones. Mainly I like that it puts its front stuff on top instead of actually on the front or behind a flap or anything. There is speedy USB3.0 (x2) and two regular USBs, mic and HD audio and an SD card reader that I don't have a header for on the motherboard, I don't think. Oh and a SWITCH for turning it ON. The motherboard is a mid-range ASUS but it does have M.2 (more on that shortly) and superfast USB3.1 ports out the back. In total I have four regular USB, four USB3.0, two USB3.1 and a weird "type c" one or something that I don't understand. So obviously I'll still be running out like always.

I put a total of five case fans in, two 140mm beasts at the top and two 120mm normoes at the front to go with the 120mm rear one that it came with. Even with all going full pelt it's not too loud. Quieter than SPINKLY was. That was my first proper PC bought sixteen years ago. It was not very good.

The case also moves the PSU to the bottom and separates it from everything else with a steel box. This allows it to exhaust out the bottom rather than into the case and directly over the CPU, which is a genius idea. The PSU itself is a mid-range non-modular but it's fine. There is a magnetic flap on top of the case to cover the two fans when they're not in use and a filter when they are. It is a case of amazing and I may never replace it again.

Processor

I went top of mid range, i.e. a Core i5 7600k which is unlocked for overclocking, though it looks like it mostly underclocks to save power when I'm not doing anything intensive. I can remember when adjusting clock speed on the fly was a recipe for crashes but this seems rock steady. Intel has stopped shipping chips with a stock cooler, luckily I noticed this before ordering or I would have been annoyed. I bought a cheapy HSF that is adjustable to just about any motherboard under the sun. I also bought another tube of thermal goo which will go mostly unused as you only ever need a tiny bit. Anyway everything went in easily enough and my anti-static wristband only fell off about two million times so win.

RAM

A couple of DDR4 Corsair or Crucial or something, 16GB with heat spreaders. They support dual channel but I put them in in single channel mode since I doubt they will ever be a bottleneck. RAM has not come down in price much in the last five years.

Boot drive

I went crackers and got the Samsung 960evo which has the newish M.2 interface. This is the only aspect of the build that was significantly different to five years ago. The card is a small PCB which fits directly onto the motherboard similar to a PCI card. I was half expecting Windows to not recognise it but it did so yay. It is 250GB and means I boot up in a few seconds.

Data drive

Another SSD, this one the slower but still shit-off-a-shiny-shovel SATA/6GB. It is 500GB which is not huge but should be fine. May the era of hard disks finally die forever amen.

Optical storage

I put in the SuperMultiBlue BD writer from my last build, the only internal component I reused. I love burning blu-ray disks, I don't know why but they seem very unfashionable. Most prebuilt PCs seem to stick with DVD-RWs even though a blu-ray writer would probably only add around £20 to the build. Embrace blu-ray writing, world.

Graphics card

GeForce GTX1060. This seems a decent upper-mid range card. I haven't really put it through its paces yet but I ran the SteamVR tool to see if it could handle an Oculus Rift or similar and it passed with flying colours, whatever they are, so that is nice.

OS

I went for Windows 10 Pro OEM which installed quickly and easily, though configuring it after that was exhausting. Windows keeps hiding more and more of the useful stuff and replacing it with crap I don't need - did you know Win10 comes with Minecraft pre-installed? But after many hours of wrangling I finally got everything installed, drivers set up and so forth.

Overall it was probably the easiest build I've done, I only swore at it maybe a hundred times and I only lost around twenty fiddly little screws so WIN.

I took the opportunity to also upgrade my desktop speakers. I got a nice stereo pair of Wavemaster speakers with a subwoofer. It sounds good but my favourite thing about it is a large volume knob that sits on my desk and means I don't have to reach down any more like in the bad old days of last week. Reaching down is for LOSERS.

ETA: Forgot to mention that I kept my existing monitor which is an IPS LED-backlit full HD panel and the state of the art hasn't moved on much from there. I could have gone up to 4K or something I suppose but for the cost it's not really worth it.