About 3 years ago I was dumb and bought an Alienware x51 R2. It was advertised as an entry level upgrade-able PC but man is that far from the truth. I went to upgrade from the sorry excuse of a GPU that came with the system so I put a GTX 970 in it. That was the second idiotic mistake as the x51 doesnt even have a PSU despite being a desktop, it has a 330 watt POWER BRICK! Now I have to throttle the GPU with MSI Afterburner and because afterburner only updates that signal every 10th of a second sometimes my PC just power trips which I'm guessing is pretty bad for it.
So, what I'm going to do is ditch the Alienware case and motherboard all together and move the parts into a new suitable home.
The parts I have in the Alienware x51 R2 right now:
GPU: GTX 970, 4GB of GDDR5 RAM and its the "Acitve cooling extreme 2.0" edition (meaning it has 2 big fans on it)
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 CPU @ 3.40 GHz (I would like to be able to upgrade this to an i5 later)
RAM: 2, 8GB DDR3 sticks
Storage: a single 1TB HDD (I would like to be able to add a second HDD or SSD with the new motherboard)
So I'm looking for a case, motherboard, and PSU that can support my current components but will allow me to upgrade them at a later date. I would like the motherboard to support SLI of 2 GPUs because I'm not going to have more than 2 anyways. Also 4 RAM slots would be a plus as I know most have 4 anyway but its not that big of a deal because 16gigs of RAM seems to more than enough for any game so long as I'm not running a server.
What wattage of PSU do you recommend anyway, because I don't really know what Ill need but I really don't want to have less than Ill need.
I don't know a lot about case fans I just know that I don't want any overheating and I don't really care about noise. All I care about is cooling an price.
When the case is involved I don't care about looks or size I just want good cooling and plenty of room for components and fans.
When its all put together will I be able to just put my current hard drive in the machine, boot it up and have all my files and my operating system the same exact way I left it or will it be more more complicated than that?
I'm looking into this motherboard and i have no idea about what PSU and case I need,
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z97X-SLI-2-Way-DualBIOS-Motherboard/dp/B00K2RQAQY/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1469646660&sr=1-1&keywords=z97x-sli
Any help is greatly appreciated and I don't know a whole lot when it comes to building a gaming PC from the ground up but everyone keeps saying its not as hard as it seems.
So, what I'm going to do is ditch the Alienware case and motherboard all together and move the parts into a new suitable home.
The parts I have in the Alienware x51 R2 right now:
GPU: GTX 970, 4GB of GDDR5 RAM and its the "Acitve cooling extreme 2.0" edition (meaning it has 2 big fans on it)
CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 CPU @ 3.40 GHz (I would like to be able to upgrade this to an i5 later)
RAM: 2, 8GB DDR3 sticks
Storage: a single 1TB HDD (I would like to be able to add a second HDD or SSD with the new motherboard)
So I'm looking for a case, motherboard, and PSU that can support my current components but will allow me to upgrade them at a later date. I would like the motherboard to support SLI of 2 GPUs because I'm not going to have more than 2 anyways. Also 4 RAM slots would be a plus as I know most have 4 anyway but its not that big of a deal because 16gigs of RAM seems to more than enough for any game so long as I'm not running a server.
What wattage of PSU do you recommend anyway, because I don't really know what Ill need but I really don't want to have less than Ill need.
I don't know a lot about case fans I just know that I don't want any overheating and I don't really care about noise. All I care about is cooling an price.
When the case is involved I don't care about looks or size I just want good cooling and plenty of room for components and fans.
When its all put together will I be able to just put my current hard drive in the machine, boot it up and have all my files and my operating system the same exact way I left it or will it be more more complicated than that?
I'm looking into this motherboard and i have no idea about what PSU and case I need,
https://www.amazon.com/Gigabyte-GA-Z97X-SLI-2-Way-DualBIOS-Motherboard/dp/B00K2RQAQY/ref=sr_1_1?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1469646660&sr=1-1&keywords=z97x-sli
Any help is greatly appreciated and I don't know a whole lot when it comes to building a gaming PC from the ground up but everyone keeps saying its not as hard as it seems.