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In a post of September of 2017, I talked about the build I had done for my son's birthday back in May. It had taken me a year to gather all the parts that went into the machine, but in the end, he was happy and it was worth the trouble. Three years later, as we finish out this year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that time again. My son is a rising senior headed toward his last year of high school and then on to college to study engineering of some sort...... Which mean this...... that machine driven by a Pentium G4400 and rockin' a GTX-750ti graphics card wasn't going to cut it.
And with another birthday fast approaching, it was a good time to upgrade his "gaming pc" to a full-blown college-ready workstation! When I analyzed his equipment, it looked like the bones were there. The Corsair Carbide 380t case is compact enough to go if he goes and certainly is fine if he wants to stay at home and start locally. I had gotten him a pair of 22" HP business-class monitors last year so that was fine as well. What needed some sprucing up was the ASRock motherboard which had only 1 of 2 RAM sockets working, and a Pentium G4400 driving the system. So I set a $300 budget to get it all done; motherboard, processor and graphics card.
$86 went to a Skylake i5-6500. Four cores running at 3.2Ghz with a little bit of headroom to bump it up. Little Sis chipped in by buying an inexpensive, but effective CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Black HSF, but that turned out to be 1/4" too tall for his case, so I had to chase down an M4 low-profile HSF to replace it. Now, I have an extra Hyper 212 sitting in the closet! I found a GTX-1060 on eBay for $120 because it was a Dallas seller and I didn't have to pay shipping! Then things got complicated.....
I had decided that we should go with the higher end Skylake chipset boards; either the Z170 or H170. Looking around, I found that the Mini-ITX boards of that generation tended to run around $100, plus or minus regardless of chipset. I was able to find a Gigabyte Z170 board for $90 shipped, but missing it's I/O shield which cost another $10 out of China. Everything came in around the same time last weekend and we got to work. That's when the upgrade train went off the rails!
It started out with the Hyper 212 being a quarter of an inch too tall and the rest was just downhill after that! Next, I couldn't find the other stick of RAM for his machine, then the board refused to POST. Then started the trouble-shooting routine. One thing at a time using everything including his old board and processor. It turned out that the board just wasn't going to boot. I even tried straightening a few pin in the socket that looked bent. No Joy! Luckily the seller was a good guy and refunded the money immediately. Then I found another board just like it in LA and the guy offered it to me for $60 shipped. It was sold "working" but with some bent pins in the socket! I took a chance anyway!
It came today and Whatayaknow!!! It came right up.... bent pins and all.
I have to say that all was not "wine and roses". I'm sure some of you have already guessed it! ....... the upgrade cause the Windows10 load to "deactivate". One new key and an hour and a half of tech support later, I can say that "I'm very angry at Micro$oft"!!!
In the end, the whole thing came in under budget and his machine is ready for a few more years. Yeah, I'm going to have to pull the board and install the M4 HSF assembly when it shows up from Canada in a week or so and I have some parts to sell back off too. Now, if I can only figure out what I did with that other stick of RAM I squirreled away 3 years ago.....
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!
