User blog:Meta07/Snow Pixie's 7 new colors (on Meta7's 17th birthday on April 27th)

Greetings everybody! So, as you may've guessed, this is yet another blog post about my dear PC Yukipishi, just because I'm completely nuts. So, near my 17th birthday yesterday, mom had the chance to go to the US and she asked me if I'd like any electronics, and I took the chance. Thus she gave me some stuff, and I finished upgrading and reinstalling Windows on her yesterday, right on my birthday. I've done testing her today and now I'm going to tell you the results. Behold, the latest incarnation of my companion...

Yukipishi Samukaze Sairai
 Well, so what's this 7 colors thing I went on about? It's essentially 7 new parts for her... First, the most important...

#1 - Gigabyte R9 270X 2GB Windforce Video Card
 My main reason for upgrading. I originally planned to go with a 750 Ti, but then switched to the Gigabyte R9 270X 2GB because:

- It has a Gigabyte Windforce 3x cooler, my favorite VGA cooler series out there, even though this is the older 450W model.

- HOLY SH... That price! I was shocked when I found out how much AMD cards' prices have dropped since Maxwell came up. The low price made this one way more of a bang-for-buck card than the GTX 750 Ti. Just a few more dollars for nearly twice the performance.

- nVidia is evil. I like AMD more, even though rationally considering, nVidia's software support is better for me for pretty much everything I do. Plus, AMD has a red theme, which is one of my least favorite colors.

I also did a light overclock on the card (nothing much since it's very hot here so I'm shy of overclocking), and it worked very well on benchmarks. I haven't tested it with real graphics-intensive games yet, though.

#2 & #3 - Corsair Vengeance Pro 2x8GB 1600MHz CAS 9
 Since I multitask a lot and am studying After Effects, I need a lot of RAM. Went with the Vengeance Pro because it was the best-looking RAM in my opinion and it has a great cooler. Plus, I wanted a dual-channel 1600MHz CAS 9 kit for optimal non-overclocking performance. Again, gold color to match with theme.

#4 - Samsung 850 EVO 120GB SSD
 SSD! I went with the 850 EVO because... well, there was no reason NOT to go for it. One of the fastest speed out there (as far as 2.5" SATA SSDs go I think it's only slower than Samsung's own 850 Pro...) with a dirt-cheap price. I only went with a 120GB SSD though, because I already had a 2TB HDD which is more than enough, and I just wanted a SSD to act as the system drive.

#5 - NZXT HUE LED Kit
 The NZXT HUE LED Kit is a RGB LED kit to light up the interior of your PC with fully customizable colored LED lights and multiple lighting modes. I decided to get it just to be fancy for the upgrade, ehehe... Well, I must second what everyone has said about this device: The lights work BRILLIANTLY, but the adhesive sucked and it came off easily, but I've got some tape so no biggie. Also, since Yukipicchi's case is relatively small and tight, like a corset, I had some difficulties installing it, but in the end I managed to do it, even though the routing is pretty awkward... :S

#6 - Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
 I actually like the MX-4 more than the AS5, but I went with the AS5 because I needed a thermal compound CLEANER to wipe off my old thermal compound for reapplication, since the old thermal compound was applied very poorly. When I bought the CPU cooler, a technician at the store offered to install it for me, and I agreed, but it turned out he was a freshman and didn't know how to properly apply thermal paste, so he just pumped the paste everywhere, but I couldn't stop him in time. Thus, I searched for thermal compound cleaners online and found the ArctiClean, and I thought I may as well get Arctic Silver 5 in the process since there was a bundle. May not be the best choice for me, but hey, no one can say that AS5 isn't a great paste!

#7 - Samsung Extreme 64GB USB Flash Drive
 Got this USB because of its large capacity and fast USB 3.0 speed. I tested it by copying a Magical Mirai video file, and it managed to keep a consistent 120 MB/s real life copying speed. Plus, tt now also acts as my Windows installation "disc".

Ok, so those are all the new parts! Here comes the pictures and the benchmark results...

More (Dishearteningly Poor) Pictures of Completed Build


Ok, now, for the benchmark results!

PassMark PerformanceTest 8 Results
 Ok, so you probably skipped the overly long photo. In short, she got 4811 points in PassMark, which is quite a high score for a mid-range media PC! In fact, all of her parts clocked in at a bit higher score than the part's average... ^^

3DMark Results
 She managed to run the vigorous FireStrike test at movie speed (24 FPS) throughout, which is acceptable for her configuration and purpose. Nothing wrong here.

Unigine Valley Results
This benchmark must be my favorite benchmarking software now, because it was absolutely beautiful without being nonsensically hardware-intensive, plus it has a free and walking camera mode and environment modifiers that allowed me to interact with the benchmark instead of just sit there watching a dry "video". Anyhow, Yukipishi almost hit the Casual Gaming speed (30 FPS) while running Unigine Valley at the absolute highest settings, which is quite good.

So, that's all for this blog post, thank you very much for reading this all through! ^^ If you want, you can also check out my PCPartPicker post about Yukipishi Samukaze Sairai here, which contains some more info on the previously bought parts of the build: https://pcpartpicker.com/b/gPWXsY

Koufuku Metanana 15:18, April 28, 2015 (UTC)