Hey folks, it's been a while since I have frequented these waters, but it's come time to replace my old trusty Sandy Bridge machine, for technical reasons. My motherboard has decided to start slowly freezing at intermittent times so *everything* stops. I can't see anything on the logs with Windows, and I don't know enough about Linux to start diagnosing HSM violations left right and centre. I know the SMART statuses of my drives are OK, and I've recently purchased a GTX, so this is a partial build advice request. So, I'm looking for the following: A new case big enough to fit a Geforce GTX 970, preferably a midtower. Keep in mind the main issue I currently have is my GPU heatsink is a little longer than the PCB and I've had to rearrange the hard drives to get it to fit in the cheaper Antec 100 I have at the moment, so having something where a cage of drives is removable would be nice. I've also noticed some occasional coil whine with the card, so some form of noise reduction in the case would be good to have as well. An ATX motherboard with enough SATA 3 6Gbps slots for two SSDs, an HDD and more data expansion in the future, and that can support DDR4 memory. An M.2 slot keyed for PCI-bus SSDs would be nice as a possible OS drive in future, but not completely essential if not in budget. 16GB RAM at a minimum, enough for me to run a virtual machine/local server or two whilst I'm working, and I've found 8GB is frankly too small for that purpose. Skylake CPU preferred, but if it's not much more performance for the price I'd be happy with an older CPU and DDR4 motherboard system (or if you think the hex-core system will help the VM situation, for instance, I don't have much too experience with Hyper-V VMs beyond four cores). A new CPU fan cooler (if the Sandy Bridge fan coolers don't like the 1151 fittings) A power supply to match. Thermal paste, if there have been any good new ones out in the last 5 years As an FYI, my current monitor is a 1080p monitor, so don't worry about the gaming front for now, my 970 is more than enough. All I really care about in this instance is the VM multitasking workload limitations when running servers and virtual machines for my hobbyist software development. Total budget for the build is between £800 and £1100, and I understand this might take a while given Skylake isn't out yet. I will post back with a possible build after Gamescom and the reviews start to form up.
