This blog might get a bit geeky!

Today we start shipping our new range of enthusiast Gorilla EX Rigs, the first being aptly named The First Monkey

Gorilla EX are intended to be the base for a system that you can improve over time, they come assembled and pre-loaded with the windows 8.1 operating system so you can add wireless, more storage, graphics cards and cooling to the builds easily when you want to.

The First Monkey sits in a versitile Corsair Spec-01 mid tower, with plenty of space and power to do some pretty cool builds. We can add 120mm LED fans with fancy controllers, wireless and solid state storage later – right now we start off with a quick look at graphics card options!

As this rig hasn't had a graphics card installed in it before I think it's a great time to jump straight into the BETA AMD dual graphics drivers and get that APU working with GPU to see what kind of benchmarks we get.

The First Monkey runs an unlocked AMD A8–6600K quad core cpu with intergrated graphics 8570D. I'll be adding the Asus R7 250 graphics card for this test, bringing the total build cost to around $970.

Once the card is installed I enter the bios and force enable the onboard graphics in the northbridge (NB) settings tab which is found in advanced settings. While I was in here I also set the 8GB 1600MHz Ram to run at 1866MHz.

Several reboots later I get the pop up box asking if I would like to turn on AMD Dual Graphics :)

Here we go!

Now that was pretty cool :) How about we go a bit futher by adding a much larger graphics card. I have an outstanding Sapphire Vapour-X R9 270X here that should should be just about right.

This is a two slot card so first I remove another expansion slot cover (these can be taken off and put back as builds change, one of the many reasons we like this chassis) and seat the card in the motherboard.

This card requires 2×6pin power connection to run, you'll find these tucked conveniently under the bottom hard drive bay. Drivers are a breeze here, no bios settings need tweaking as I'm no longer going for dual graphics so I reset to default during a reboot.

It's pretty temping to keep on tinkering but we better get to work building the rest of the Gorilla EX range, there will be two AMD and Intel options available soon :)

Remember, these builds are intended for computer enthusiasts who want a base system to customise and improve on – if you are after a no fuss complete custom build with all the trimmings check out our Gorilla in the Mist which can be anything you want :)