Since we decorated our lounge earlier in the year my PC was deemed "too ugly" to be in the lounge. In fairness it was on a horrible IKEA desk, and was a pretty large Antec 300 gaming case. So it was relegated to the garage which I recently had electric routed into. During the summer that's all fine and well but as the nights are drawing in and temperatures are dropping, it's basically a place I'd rather not be spending my time. I mainly use the Macbook Air in the house in our shiny new glass desk, however it's not really up to the task of running games that are less than 10 years old. So I decided what I needed was something small, but powerful.
The obvious choice seemed to be a mini ITX build. They're becoming quite popular as gaming machines now, probably as they're easy to take to LAN parties etc. However it also seems ideal for what I'm looking to do, have a small machine for gaming in the house. With that in mind I went about collecting up the following parts this weekend, hopefully for delivery tomorrow.
Antec ISK 600 Gaming Cube CasePossibly not the best looking case ever, but it's well build, brushed aluminium, and not very big. However you can still fit an ITX board in there, a large graphics card, watercooling and more hard drives than I'll ever need to use.
MSI Z97I Gaming AC One of the best mini ITX boards around at the moment, based on the newest Z97 chipset. It has USB 3, Sata 6, and supports overclocking, particularly via multipliers, which is going to be important for me. It's actually overkill for hat I'm building, bit I'd rather spend a little more and future proof the board, as it's going to outlast the CPU. I also got it quite a bit cheaper than Amazon advertised.
Corsair Hydro H80 CoolerAny self respecting overclocker is going to need a watercooling loop, and I'm lazy and can't be bothered piping together a proper one from scratch. This should be more than enough for my needs. My PC currently has the H50 in it which is fantastic, however I don't have the necessary plates to port it over to another motherboard, it's currently cooling my AMD Phenom X4 965 Black Edition.
And lastly...
Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258I added a thread about it here,
http://www.golfgtiforum.co.uk/index.php?topic=270449.0. It's basically the overclocking bargain of the year, google it and look at the reviews yourself. It'll overclock by around 50% which means well over 4Ghz, on a £50 chip!! Reviews are pretty positive. Yeah a high end I5/I7 CPU is going to beat it, but they cost over 4 times as much! If it's value for money you want, this is the one to go for. Plus, I can just replace it later on as I bought a decent motherboard. This bad boy is why I needed watercooling.
the rest of the parts I'm going to take from the PC I already have in the garage.
64GB SSD drive
2TB hard drive
8GB of Corsair memory, can't remember which
2GB MSI GTX760 TwinFroz
Quite looking forward to seeing how the machine pans out
