The move from Alienware to Custom.

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Raycorrupt

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Feb 25, 2013
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I've had an Alienware Aurora R4 for 3-4 years and I'm finally looking to start upgrading it to a real computer. (Kappa)

It's got i7 3820 liquid cooled and GTX 680. I've heard that the motherboard is proprietary so I was wondering what I should upgrade to if I'm in the market for a dust-proof, high-airflow case, motherboard and possibly new CPU or GPU? I've heard good things about Ryzen but I don't know enough about it to know if it will be good for what I have.
It will be for playing games like World of Warcraft :)

tl;dr parts: alienware aurora r4: i7 3820, gtx 680. need: new case, upgraded parts, new mobo. budget: £350 ($425).

Thank you!
 
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PhysX_HW

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Sep 23, 2015
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Why would you want to get a new motherboard? You don't need such a fast PC to run World of Warcraft.

Anyway, if you really want to upgrade, just get a Xeon E5-2670 from ebay and you can spend the rest on a graphics card.

At least that's what I would do. You would have 8 real cores and you should have enough money left to get a 1060 or a used 1070 which would be a good match for the CPU.
 
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Raycorrupt

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Feb 25, 2013
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I can't reuse the motherboard in a new case, as it's proprietary to the Alienware case. Is that Xeon suitable for gaming? I'd have thought an i5 or Ryzen would have been recommended? The suggestion for a used GPU is exactly what I was looking for, and probably what I'll end up getting. I found a 1070 for around £320 so I'll probably get that. Would it bottleneck my current CPU (i7 3820)?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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Basically, you're building a whole new PC.
£350 is pretty slim for that.
 
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Raycorrupt

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The main thing I was looking for was a new case and therefore motherboard, which will allow me to upgrade down the line when I have more money. I'm guessing this will cost me around £100-150. With the remaining £250 do you think I should buy a new CPU (for socket compatibility depending on mobo) or keep the old CPU, buy a cheap motherboard and get a GPU?
 
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USAFRet

USAFRet

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So...
New case
New motherboard
New GPU
New CPU
New RAM?
New PSU?

This looks like a whole new PC to me.

What will you be keeping from the Alienware? Maybe the drive(s)?
Build a new system, recover some of the cost by selling the alienware.
 
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PhysX_HW

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I am using one of those Xeons and whilst it may not have the best single thread performance, but it's on par with a 6700k@4.6Ghz in multithreaded applications. I only have a 7970 so I don't know whether it would be a bottleneck for a 1070, but I don't think it would. The newer games can use the multiple threads, so they would run pretty smoothly on the Xeon.

I think that the motherboard is a normal mATX board and not proprietary, so you can use it in any PC case, and since you have watercooling, you could even OC that CPU to around 4.6Ghz I believe. This is a very nice tutorial on how to do so. You can just set the multiplier to 43x to get 4.3Ghz, but you can tweak the other setting too to get aroung 4.6-4.7Ghz stable. The cooling shouldn't be an issue with that 120mm AIO.

 
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