ah, ok
asus are pretty much always very good, nice
Just wanna thank everyone for their help and suggestions. Makes things a little easier to buy stuff especially when you get some good info.
Glad to help! Let us know how it goes.
I currently have a older artic silver 5 from several yrs ago. It's still good. Is there something better or is article silver good enough.
Price range from 30 and up. I would like some options.
Also it would be nice to get one of those fan controller that fits in the 3.5 bay.
Is there any other brand of CPU heat sink fan u can recommend?
I would like something that is quite as possible but if I ever oc I wanna make sure it heat sink fan can handle it. Especially during the summer.
I kind of like the idea of a closed loop water cooler.
You know, you can edit your post rather than making a new post for every extra comment.
There is better paste than AS5, but AS5 is good enough as long as it isn't all dried up.
The True Spirit 140 is a really good cooler. Not just a good $50 cooler, but a good cooler. I wouldn't bother with a CLC since you have a case that can take a big air cooler.
As for a fan controller, I would just plug the fans into the motherboard fan headers and let it take care of adjusting their speed in response to temperature.
What do u guys think of this ssd. It seems like a good deal. I want it as extra storage for my new build. I bought a crucial brand already and thought if this is worth it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...rp.-_-20721107
Also can u guys recommend a good antivirus / anti-malware anti everything software
It's a pretty good deal if you really need some extra SSD space for less than $100. This M500 240GB for $110 AR is better cost per gig though.
Microsoft Security Essentials
The amount is a grain of rice, not salt. That should work even with paste this old. Though there are other ways to do it. My personal preference is spreading it with a razor blade.
Rubbing alcohol is the correct solvent to use when cleaning up thermal paste. I usually use an old rag that I don't mind turning black, but qtips would work too, if a bit laborious.
You don't have to clean the paste off the top of the CPU as long as it hasn't dried out or gotten hot. If it has, then you should clean it before reseating the heatsink.
You don't need to install the utilities, some of the included ones offer additional controls specific to the boards (like fan control or special power states etc.) but are never truly needed. As far as drivers are concerned, my recommendation is to just install the networking driver that came on the disc and grab the latest version of everything else online (often times an upgraded version of the networking drivers as well).
The general rule of thumb for BIOS updating is don't unless you need to, as screwing up an update can completely brick a motherboard. Now if you're okay with the risk or just use to doing it or just want the most up to date BIOS, the method differs slightly from brand to brand but are overall the same. They usually come in 2 forms, 1 is a file that can be read from the BIOS to update the BIOS, the other is something that has to be loaded in an OS environment. If you just ordered the board you're likely already running the most recent revision or close to the most recent as far as the BIOS is concerned as they don't typically change that much over the course of a board's product lifespan unless it has major issues or is around during a shift in features/compatibility.
As for boot priority, I find the easiest way to deal with a fresh Windows install is to set your SSD as the primary drive in your boot priority and then just let it tick over to your optical drive or go from the BIOS and force it to start just once from your optical. The reason is that if you have your optical as your primary drive in the boot priority list then after it gets most of the Windows install ready it'll just repeat the process over and over (or at least it seems to for me most of the time). Alternatively if you're paying attention you could just take the disc out and leave the optical drive as your primary.
For the video card drivers, I recommend going to the original GPU manufacturer's website and downloading the latest version from there, which in your case is AMD. If your card uses a custom PCB layout and maybe something special about the cooler or some other feature you might lose out on that from time to time but overall the best graphical performance will come from the most up to date manufacturers drivers.
Your memory will likely be running at 1066 or 1333 MHz at stock speeds, to get the full speed out of it you'll need to go to your BIOS and enable it's XMP profile which is all the factory tuned overclock settings. Alternatively since you know the speeds you can get since they're promised by the manufacturer (hopefully they aren't lying) you can just do a manual overclock of the memory to whatever speed you want as long as it falls within their set-up, it shouldn't have too much issue. But usually it's just easier to use the XMP profile and call it a day.
Some SSD's come with software or utilities but for the most part no, you don't need to do anything special for your SSD's as any recent revision of Windows or Mac should already be able to identify and make adjustments for SSD's without being told to do so.
I would try and update Windows as much as possible as some types of drivers require newer/updated versions of the Framework to be installed correctly. With 8.1 being so recent however I don't think you'll need a significant amount of updates before your drivers will load without issues but Windows -> Drivers is the more efficient route if you have time on your hands.