Colossus never did get over the annoying boot problem it was having, which is a known issue with the Asrock Z97 Extreme4 motherboard. So I took some of the bonus I got at work this year and used it as an excuse to perform a little upgrade.
Colossus is now based on a Gigabyte Z170X Gaming 5 motherboard, has an i7 6700K, and has 16GB of DDR4 memory at 3200MHz. I kept the Corsair AX760 PSU, Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD, 1GB WD Caviar Black HDD, ASUS Xonar Essence STX audio card, and EVGA GTX 980Ti SC+. I also rebuild it in a Fractal Design Define S case, which is a really nifty case. Among other things, it features 140mm fans, which are noticeably quieter than the 120mm fans I used to use.
I also carried over the same Windows 10 installation (the one I got for free from my Windows 7 upgrade). So far, Windows isn’t complaining about the new hardware. I’m going to have a bit of time getting all of the old motherboard utilities off and the new ones on, though.
Pretty soon I’ll be renaming it. Colossus’ time is past. I haven’t come up with a new name yet, though.
I also bought a few components to flesh out the husk of the old Colossus into a second PC. I intend to use it to replace Archivist, my QNAP NAS. Archivist is doing a good job, but it’s too boring. I haven’t had it for very long, but I realized pretty quickly that what I wanted wasn’t actually a NAS. I wanted a Linux box that I could hack on and turn into a NAS myself. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to pull the RAID straight from Archivist and put it in the new box, but I’m not holding my breath. It’ll probably end up an Ubuntu box, but I’m also toying with the idea of running CoreOS on it.
Windows 10 - 64bit - Pro
