My new rig is finally up and running, and it's GREAT. I can't believe the POS I put up with until this week. How did I even manage to play a round of my favorite beta software... Anyway! The upgrade wasn't exactly plug and play. Getting an ivy bridge i5 3550 I went for a P67a motherboard from Gigabyte. Sata3, USB3 and 22nm ready.. or so they said on the website. Turned out that Ivy bridge cpu support was added in a bios update from february 2012, and the card I bought had left the factory before then... So I had a brand new PC capable of showing the bios splash screen for 30 sec, with no keyboard initialized (ps2 & usb) before rebooting! Of course googling the problem was not my first response. The pc was re-assembled with extra care. RAM was tried in all combinations, HDD disconnected, old GPU tested, even the wife's PC was cannibalized for the Corsair PSU just to try something with my new expensive paperweight! 2 evenings of good home building computer fun... and frustration. Googling "Gigabyte boot loop" eventually put me on to the bios not being able to handle 22nm cpu's, and others had fixed it by installing a sandy bridge, flashing bios and then installing the Ivy.. Not an option for me as the other cpu's in the house are LGA775. The store (fcomputer.dk) was very helpful in trading in the mobo, so I ended up with an MSI H77 express instead. All this fast and shiny graphics running at more FPS than I can count is going to cost me a lot of sleep in the coming weeks.
Sweet! Congratulations on getting it up and running =). I started my upgrade the day before yesterday by buying a GTX670. The rest of the parts will have to wait for awhile, planning something similar to yours but with a 3570k (unlocked multiplier). My q6600 will have to do for awhile longer.
The q6600 being a quadcore should make it able to have MWO chugging along at a decent framerate. And waiting to purchase is always good advice when it comes to PC hardware. More bang for the buck. Unless som silicium plant in the far east goes boom.. Tomorrow I'm picking up a pair of SSD's to use as a raid0 system drive. And a SATA dvd, as I hadn't paid attention to the PATA port going the way of the floppy. Now if only I can find my win7 dvd, I'm ready to to a complete re-inst. Altough I must say that Win7 handled the change of chipset and cpu very well, and reactivating the license was no hassle at all.
