R&D
70 MAXIMUMPC MAR 2020 maximumpc.com
ALAN DEXTER, EXECUTIVE EDITORWe’re doing things a little differently from
normal this month. Instead of building a system
from scratch, we’re upgrading one of the office
machines to better handle the multithreaded
world in which we increasingly find ourselves.
The machine in question is the test system I use
on a daily basis, and while it has served me well
for a couple of years, it is star ting to show its age,
and as we’re surrounded by so much hardware, it
feels like a good time to upgrade to something a
bit more current. A bit more future-proof.
The starting point isn’t a bad machine by any
means: It features an Intel Core i7-7700K at its
heart, along with 16GB of RAM, and a GeForce
GTX 1080 graphics card. If there is a problem,
it’s on the storage side of things. The Samsung
840 SATA SSD is a little slow (particularly when
it comes to write speeds), but at 250GB, the issue
is more the fact that it’s too cramped to install
more than a few apps on, and I often find myself
having to clear out junk in order to stop the drive
filling up. This has forced me to turn to the big
spinning hard drive more and more, which isn’t
exactly speedy.
Not everything needs to be thrown out in the
upgrade. The Phanteks P400 case needs dusting,
but other than that, it’s a quality unit that will live
on after the upgrade. The 3TB hard drive is also
worth hanging on to, although upgrading to an
M.2 NVMe drive should mean I’m not as reliant on
it anyway. Finally, the PSU has plenty of capacity
for a serious upgrade, and I’ll be hoping to hang
on to that as well. Ever y thing else is up for grabs,
though, which makes for quite the upgrade.THE CONCEPT
LENGTH OF TIME: 3–4 HOURSWorkstation
Upgrade
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUMStretching the concept of an upgrade to ridiculous levels,
we give a gaming PC a workstation makeover