Vanquish 3: Two Years Later

Well, I've had my Vanquish 3 for two incredible, exciting years. My Xbox One isn't collecting as much dust as it was in Year One, for the simple fact that Titanfall 2's population is much larger on consoles.

For my first anniversary, I replaced the rear exhaust with an LED fan, a bottom intake, and twin exhaust fans up top. I also replaced the 8GB Adata RAM with 16GB of Crucial Ballistix.

At the 18-month mark, I added in an Elgato Game Capture HD60 Pro above the 970.

And now, this morning, as I'm days away from the 2nd anniversary with this amazing machine, I have finally replaced my biggest aesthetic gripe with the Vanquish 3's interior; the ugly-as-sin PNY 970.





35 minutes and one heart attack later, it's in, and quite a beautiful sight.

So what was the heart attack? The preceding 970 wouldn't come out. No matter which way I pulled it wouldn't budge after I had removed all the screws and released the retention tab. It finally came out with a good yank, and my heart dropped when the retention tab came with it. I was absolutely certain that it had been released, having checked it dozens of times in the removal attempts.

Luckily the PC gods favored me, and I didn't break it. It snapped right back into place on the motherboard. I got the 1080 seated and screwed in with no further incident.

And dear sweet lord...

Doom maxed. 200 fps.
Witcher 3 maxed. Rock solid 60 fps.
No Man's Sky maxed. Variable fps.
Titanfall 2 maxed. 144 fps.

Suffice to say, building a rig from scratch can probably wait a bit longer now. I'm more than good for the time being.

Still an absolutely amazing machine, Digital Storm. I can't imagine I'll be upgrading this again as my 4th gen Intel board and DDR3 memory get older and older, but now I really, really want to get it up from under the desk so I can lovingly stare at it more often. The red of the motherboard, the green of the GPU, and the blue of the fans...

As my finace put it: "Hey, you don't get closer to RGB than that!"

Edited by milesprower06 - 11 May 2017 at 6:49pm

That is a super nice setup in there. Thanks for the images and report.

Nice upgrade, thanks for the share and update.