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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!
My children were born 3 days apart; well actually, 3 days shy of 3 years, making it 2 years and 262 days. So, once a year, we have a birthday weekend. When it's over we collapse. We have the condolences of all our friends and co-workers, but it's really not horrible. It's chaos for a weekend, then it's done... till next year. This year, my daughter turned 11 and my son 14. And any of you with teenage/pre-teenage children will know that it's a weird age. My daughter still wanted a traditional sleep-over with 7 other squealing girls but my son was over the theme thing and just wanted to have a few of his like-minded (read nerdy, no surprise there huh) friends over and play games, eat pizza, and drink lots of carbonated beverages. This year though, both of these things will have long-term effects on me and my hobbies.
The daughter decided that this looked like a good idea...... so we built it....... Yes, a Drive-In theater..... in our driveway. Here's what happened.
Around the time we started talking about party ideas, I was working on a projector I had picked up for $15 years ago. No, that's not it. The simple fix was to replace the bulb, but that didn't work, so I was looking around to see if there was another one on Craigslist. What I found was that old projectors taken from schools and offices are cheap. Like ranging from $15 to $50 cheap! This started the wheels turning in my head. Being a teacher, I'm very familiar with them and their capabilities, so I bought one for $30; an NEC VT480. For $30, I got a machine with 70% left on it's 2000 thousand hour bulb life and 800 x 600 resolution (1024 x 768 data) which is plenty to project a move to a pretty decent size. Thus was born, the "home drive-in" idea.
The next step was to figure out what to do about a screen. My first impulse was to hang a big sheet or two on the garage door and call it good. However, as most of you are aware, in today's world, the first step is usually to go to YouTube and research. What I found was that it wasn't very difficult or expensive to build your own proper screen. Most look like the above, using construction lumber and "black-out" curtain material which ironically is white. I also found that there's a place out there that specializes in this stuff called Carl's Place: https://www.carlofet.com/ .....and this is where my daughter's desires and my own cross paths. While researching the proper size, I realized that I could build it to fit across the front my my media cabinetry and have a good sized screen that's a normal 16:9 wide-screen aspect ration. When it hit me, I ran out to the garage, grabbed the tape measure and ran up stairs to the "game room" and started measuring! Sure enough. I have roughly 98" across, 55" vertical giving me about 112" diagonal which is pretty darned close to the correct maximum screen size for our primary seating distance (read, mine and my wife's recliners) AND was about the size I had outside on the fence to hang it!!!
Here's the result, attached to out backyard fence at the end of the driveway. You can see the projector sitting on a folding card table. Total cost? About $60; $30 for the projector picked up locally on Craigslist and the correctly sized screen material from Carl's bought off of Amazon Prime and delivered in 2 days. I used some 1" x 4" lumber that I had, so if you don't have any laying around, it'll be another $15-20. I used the "pocket screw" method of building which was amazingly easy. I did buy the Kreg R3 kit for $40 from Lowes, but I don't really count the cost since I've been looking for an excuse to buy one and will use it as part of my woodworking hobby for years to come.
So, away from the screaming 5th grade girls and back to the home theater. When all is said and done, I now have a screen that's sized to fit exactly across the cabinetry of my home theater in the "game room". How is that going to work? Obviously, I can't cover my cabinetry that houses the A/V gear (not to mention the 55", 4K TV) on a regular basis, not to mention crushing my wife's Morning Glories on the trellis!
The solution was to put a "French-Cleat" on the back of the screen frame. This came out of the need to attach it to the fence, but not have a permanent mount on there. So I built a mount that attaches to the top of the fence with a cleat and I'll just add another cleat holder to the top of my HT cabinetry so I can take the screen on and off of there as needed. Not very sophisticated, but elegantly simplicity and most importantly: cheap. When not in use, I'll hang the screen on the back of the cabinetry to get it out of the way.
Sure; eventually, I'll need to pick up an actual HD level projector like this JVC D-ILA unit, but that's down the road. For now, I have a really cheap solution to having an actual big-screen in our system.
What does this have to do with my son's birthday? It seems pretty straight-forward, right? Well.... it did give me a chance to compare his rig to what his friends were using and also to think ahead a little. My son's machine is built in this Azza CSAZ-103 which, two years ago was fairly forward-thinking if not cutting edge. It's "console-sized", could be turned on it's side or placed horizontally, has the now pretty common flat-segmented interior to allow Mini-ITX to be small and slender. However, after the last upgrade to the nVidia GTX-750ti graphic card it's pretty much maxed out for what it's generation (Sandy/Ivy Bridge). When compared to what his friends had though, it's a nice machine and by far the most capable, but you guys know, I'm always thinking about the next thing.
There is of course, this..... the ever present spectre of the need to upgrade, but that's really not what got my attention. Plus, all upgrades in this house will have to wait in line behind the upgrade of my workstation from Z77/i7/Ivy Bridge to X99/i7 Hexacore/Haswell E has finished some time this summer.
No; the rabbit hole I went down as a result of his party was this.... As you guys know, gaming in a "mobile" sense is still a difficult proposition.... at least if you want to do it inexpensively. One of the little hassles we had to deal with while prepping for his party was that 2 (not including him) of his friends do their gaming on desktops. We were lucky in that I have random monitors sitting around, so they could just bring their "tower", keyboard and mouse. Two others had laptops which they constantly complained about which highlighted the fact that our decision to build his in small-form desktop as being correct. Anyway; helping his friends get their computers set up and going got me thinking. His machine is actually small enough to put in an equipment/tool case and still have room to hold a monitor if I did a little modification.....
Can you say: Future Lan Party, HERE WE COME!?!
No, I'm not planning another build. It's just that it's an often asked question during our "Computer Club" meetings with the students. Each new group goes through this, so I figured it's a good time to get it down somewhere instead of reinventing the wheel each time!
These are high school students, so 99% of the time, they want to build a gaming PC. So, the first and most important question is typically answered..... "what do you want to do with it". In todays suburbia, the vast majority of them already have a computer, although, it's almost always a laptop. AND.....it's typically some low end machine purchased from Wal-mart or Best Buy and plays games badly! Which is what leads them to join Computer Club to start with! It being 2016, they've all watch a bunch of videos on YouTube of guys building machines and are now well and truly confused, although they can say a few words in tech; like SSD, 4K, water-cooling and nVidia Titan.
Since we know that this will be a gaming build, then the actual graphics card will go last. Bear with me on this....
I usually start here. Let me explain my rationale:
- Most people know where this computer is going to live, both now and in the next few years.
- The location of the machine often dictates the physical size limitations (such as a dorm-room). They're not going to be in high school forever! Plus "computer club" type kids are typically college-bound.
- In today's world, you can build a decent gaming (or any) PC in any form-factor you want.
- If you're looking to buy a gaming laptop, you have too much money to be reading my blog!
- The price and performance of cases rarely if ever change, although the models often do, so if you see something you like, you might want to grab it now before they stop making it!
Increasingly, I find people looking to do something in the Micro-ATX or Mini-ITX size. Guys like me who want or need to install 3, 4, 5 or more drives, plus optical drives are dinosaurs! So, it becomes a matter of size and budget, balancing asthetics. I'm going to focus on Mini-ITX here since Micro-ATX is mostly just smaller ATX cases.
Some of you might remember my son's gaming machine build in an Azza case. I'll call this type the "console replacement". They are slender, about as tall as they are deep, and can be oriented in both vertical and horizontal direction for placement. They're typically a quadrant inside with sections for, PSU, motherboard, drives, and GPU. They range from the rather garish look of this Azza CSAZ-103 that my teenager son loves, to very subtle Silverstones and Fractals.
The other team is populated by the "box" style such as this Cooler Master Elite 110. They range from "bread-box" to "cube". These usually can house standard component (ATX PSU for instance), and typical have more drive placement options. The Fractal Node is well-know for it's ability to hold several drives and is a good candidate for a mini-server build.
While on that topic, there are a number of specialty cases designed specifically for "other" uses, such as this Silverstone DS380 for server and the above Corsair 380t which is obviously created for portability. Can you say "Lan Party"!?! So, figure out what you want, how you want it to look, and lets get started!
Next post; it'll be motherboard time.
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.
