It’s been six years since I’ve put together, and then subsequently upgraded marginally, my workstation PC. And now that I’m going to start into my seventh year, I’m thinking of upgrading the hardware of my system to something modern and more powerful that will last an even longer period of time.

Currently, with the games I have and most of the desktop applications that I have, I don’t really have to upgrade so the whole idea is really for performance reasons exclusively. This is contrast to the initial intent of my build where it was supposedly for silent operation but later mid-way of building the system, I decided to go with performance while making quiet air cooling a feature to emphasize on.

I figure that could share what I’m planning so as to give ideas to the rest of you whenever you start wanting to put together some workstation - not necessarily gaming - build.

The prime parts

The CPU

These are the parts that I’ll be focusing on for the upgrade. They are not a specific list as these parts have not come into existence yet but are generally likely to be in the market soon enough within the next year and a half.

  • The CPU will be an Intel sexta-core (you can say hexa-core if you want but I’m immature so sexta it is) that will have to have each core run at 3.5 Ghz or higher.

  • Getting such a CPU is due to, after six years running with a core i7 920 that’s managed to keep up after tasks that I’ve ever wanted to use a computer for, I’m convinced that investing in a more powerful CPU as an upgrade will be necessary to have something that - not only will last me a longer time still - but also allow me to work with things that call for high processing power (3D graphics, gaming, video editing to be precise).

The Motherboard

  • The motherboard will be an ASUS brand motherboard geared for building a workstation. An example of what I’m looking for are the ASUS P6T7 and the current ASUS X99-E WS.

  • Having owned already workstation class motherboard instead of a typical “gaming” motherboard, I’m convinced of their superior design in terms of stability and reliability for all personal builds of mine. I’ll not settle for less.

The RAM

  • DDR4 and lots of it

The secondary parts

The following parts are of low priority. The the only thing that I would seriously consider in getting in addition to the aforementioned is a single 4TB HDD in order to have very large storage for when recording video game footage, audio, and other stuff that would require large storage capacity. Otherwise most of the stuff following are entirely optional.

The Graphics Card

  • The GTX 760 will be used until I start to notice exceptional bottlenecking on part of the graphics card. So far it’s good enough for most of the games and tasks for what I put it under so I’ll continue to have it around.

  • But once it does start to show its age, I’ll consider buying either a powerful high-end model from Nvidia (EVGA being the preferred vendor), or two mid-range cards and utilize the multi-GPU solution of Nvidia’s Scalable Link Interface solution (SLi).

2x Additional 4 TB HDDs

  • The new motherboard will have more SATA ports than my current ASUS P6T7 WS, so I’ll be interested in buying two 4 TB HDDs to use for storing raw video captures, high resolution images (think 3840x2160 and 7680x4320)

  • They are both to serve as internal storage until I can manage to setup a home network server that can double up as a small network attached storage server.

1 2TB and 750GB NAND 3D SSDs

  • The purpose of the hard drives would be that one would serve to store the more common application program that I use that would benefit form the speed boost of a SSD (such as a web browser), while the other would be there to boot the operation system and only have the operating system installed.

  • This will be highly unlikely as I’m waiting for the price point per Gigabyte for SSD 3D NAND to drop to $0.05 USD/1GB. Until then, I won’t ever be going to SSD as the performance for HDDs are sufficient.

How likely this will happen very soon?

I am not very sure but I will like to start making movements to buying parts during the third or fourth quarter of 2016 as that’s when things will start to mature as far as the Intel E-chips lineup goes given that Intel’s Skylake chips will be coming out during Q1 of 2016.