There’s an incompatibility warning on the page for 128 GB of RAM, but Asus documentation says it’s supported.

Other differences: the RAM would have to change to be compatible, but I’d keep the same amount. I would have bought the X99 Pro (on purpose, this time), and nabbed a second 1 TB M.2 - though I’m not sure if I would have put together an M.2 RAID, or created TempDB drives on it for my SQL VMs. The main difference here is the motherboard. Not that I’m at all unhappy with what I ended up with, of course. If I knew how badly I was going to go over budget, I probably would have built this from the get-go. Most of the changes didn’t add a significant amount to the price. Upgraded the power supply from a 550w to an 850w The motherboard went from the X99-A to the X99-Eįilled up the ICY DOCK with 6 SSDs (but I would have done this anyway)Īdded a bunch of case fans (seriously, this thing could terraform a small planet)ĭowngraded the graphics card (who cares, right?)

The CPU went from the i7-6800K to the i7-6850K And trust me, I could have figured out other stuff to buy, too. That’s all of last year’s budget, and half of this year’s budget. When reality kicked in, this is what I ended up with. It was a reasonable build that stayed close to budget, and I was pretty happy with it. When I realized I needed to go over by a bit (storage, mostly), and that not all of my parts would even be here in the calendar year (the M.2), I started to wonder if I got the parts that I should have.

I started off really trying to stay close to budget. What I started with isn’t what I ended with

Speccy vs cpu z 2018