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A few of you might recognize my son's gaming machine. It was built around an ASRock H67 Mini-ITX LGA-1155 board which began life with a Sandy Bridge i5 CPU. It's nVidia GTX 650 got upgraded to a GTX 750ti last year. With an Intel 160Gb SSD paired with a Samsung 500Gb drive for mass storage. Over the 2 to 3 years of it's life, it's been a pretty nice machine and my son has been very happy with it.
Let's be clear here: my son isn't playing heavy duty first person shooter games like Metro Last Light, or Skyrim! He's more of a Minecraft kid....
In the last year or so, he has gotten more into Steam so there is a bit of a progression.
Although, his current favorite (Subnautica) isn't particularly challenging for the hardware either. However, me being me..... I'm always keeping an eye out for upgrades, and in my world, $50 is around the price of an "impulse buy" that doesn't require a lot of planning.
It all started with this; the EVGA GeForce GTX 750 Ti.. I saw it on the local Craigslist for $65, offered $50 and it went into his computer knowing full-well that he didn't need it.
Then came this.....the famous "Igloo" case, or the Carbide 380t by Corsair which is it's actual name. I've always wanted to get this case and do something fun in it ever since I first saw it. However, it's a little pricey and damn hard to find. A few months after the 750ti, I saw this on CL for $50 (firm), so I gave the guy his money and it sat in the corner of my office with no particular job for most of a year. It came without screws, fans or anything else, but what self-respecting builder doesn't have tons of that stuff sitting around.
About a month after that, I found this; an ASRock H110M-ITX/ac for..... you guessed it..... $50 on Craigslist...... The board was practically "new in the box" and now I had my first Skylake/Kabylake, DDR4 motherboard. I knew it was going into the 380t case, but had no idea what I was building it for....
To finish up with the theme here, I picked up an LGA1151 Intel Pentium G4400 for $50 on eBay. So, I'm up to $200 total, $50 at a time spread out over roughly a year. Admittedly, by this time, I knew what I was going to do with this machine which is why I went cheap on the Pentium vs. a more expensive Core i3/i5. Obviously, this thing was heading toward it's destiny of becoming my son's "new" gaming PC. Given the kind of games he plays at the moment, this CPU wouldn't be a problem.
At this point, my $50 theme breaks down, but hey; I did pretty good up till now, right!?! You're probably aware that DDR4 is pricey right now, and I'm kind of a "RAM guy". I refuse to use cheap and/or what I consider an inadequate amount. So, here are the issues:
- In the current computing world, 8Gb is pretty much the de-facto standard
- DDR4 is expensive- roughly $150 for 16Gb in 8Gb module pairs
- Mini-ITX boards routinely have 2 sockets for memory
- Individual 8Gb modules run $70 or more
Which leaves me with the following scenario: Buy 1 stick of 8Gb at around $70 per,..... or buy a pair of 4Gb modules at around the same outlay, then at some point in the future when I want to upgrade, having to pull out what I have, to put in more. You can imagine what I ended up doing, right? I bit the bullet and bought a pair of Crucial Ballistix Tactical for $108. More than what I wanted to spend, but not terrible in the big pciture, as you'll see.
The last thing I needed to buy was a power supply. I found one of those Newegg sales that also had a "mail-in rebate". It was $37 on sale and the rebate will be $20 more, so yeah.... it's $17 dollars! That's more like it! Not fancy, but solid and will provide plenty enough power for anything that might go into this case, now or in the future. So, that's it. That's all I bought. There's more things that go into a computer, right?
Of course there is. It needed storage and some fans, along with a few cables. It got the 600Gb Intel 3500 from my workstation (it getting a rebuild soon, shhhhhh), the 2.5", 500Gb Samsung mechanical drive that was in his old machine for "mass storage", and a pair of NZXT FN V2, 140mm case fans that was left over from previoius projects. Of course, these didn't cost anything. These fans are so quiet, that my son commented on it. You might also be wondering if I have upgrades planned.
If pushed, I'd say that, over the life of this machine, at some point, it'll probably get the above upgrades. More powerful GPUs such as a GTX x60, x70, or a "10 Series" card appear on Craigslist inexpensively all the time, so that will most likely happen first. During it's mid-cycle time-frame, it'll probably get an Intel Core i5 along with a water cooler; not because it needs it, but because, he'll think it's "cool"! At this point, I've spent $325 spread out over a year to year and a half. I just sold his old machine (with the 750ti replaced with a 650, and 160Gb Intel SSD replaced with a 500Gb mechanical HDD) for $350, so I'm upgrade with a net $25 gain!
About a week ago, my brother sent me some parts. Basically, it was centered around an Asrock Mini-ITX motherboard of the Sandy-Bridge generation. Along with it came an "S" spec i5 processor, attendant cooling and other misc parts. As the much as I LOVE computer parts, I don't really need another machine. Granted, this board is technically more advanced than the one in my bedroom HTPC and could replace that, but why? That machine does exactly everything I need it to do, and does so quietly, because it's low-powered and therefore runs "cool"! So, what to do with this relatively capable board?
Most of you are aware that I have a young son. He's not quite a teenager, but he's close enough. Right now, he plays Minecraft and loves all things 3DS, but soon enough, he'll get into "real" gaming. This year, for Christmas, we got him a Steam account and bought the Kerbal rocket building program. I'm sure he's pretty quickly want to play other PC oriented games as well. As of right now, his ThinkPad T500 is fine for what he wants to do. However, being the Nerd-Dad that I am, I'm already ahead of him on where he headed..... and that won't be anything where his ThinkPad would be very good.
As I was helping my student rebuild her old Alienware, I started thinking that one of those might be a good candidate for my son as well. However, he just doesn't have that much space in his room. A few years ago, we reworked his room and built a large loft, so there's a space underneath that's his little "boy-cave". It's nice, but it's only the size of a "queen" bed under there. Right now, he has a cabinet, that holds a TV, his a GameCube (!), XBox, and a bunch of Legos. There's some seating and it's where he "hangs out".
You can probably see where this is going. Mini-ITX board, small hang-out area..... Mini-Gaming Computer! Although that Asrock board only has an H61 chipset, we certainly won't be over-clocking or anything close to that. We are talking an 11-year-old, after all! So; here's what I'm thinking on this. I'm going to use an actual stand-alone GPU so it will have some decent graphics ability. Maybe something long the lines of an Radeon HD 7770 or an nVidia 460; whatever I can get the best deal on. A re-tasked SSD, 320Gb mechanical drive and call it good.
We're done then; right? Not so much! What does an 11-year-old want his "gaming rig" to look like? If you're my son, then, anything green will be good. As soon as I saw the Azza CSAZ-103 case, I knew that it would be the case for the boy! As it turned out, it's inexpensive, and pretty much designed as a case that replicates a gaming console to some degree. Perfect! As soon as I land a suitable graphics card, we'll start building.
