Warning: this is going to be long and probably pagestretchery.
As some of you may or may not know, I build computers as a hobby. Sometimes a friend will come up to me and ask me to put one together for them, which I usually agree to because a.) I have an eye for bargains, therefore making it much cheaper for them than a pre-built one and b.)I enjoy doing it.
(Following conversations are highly paraphrased)
I was discussing collabs or something in Skype with SlogBait when,
'Oh by the way, Nep's laptop died on him, would you maybe be able to build him a computer/fix his laptop?'
'Erm yeah, I could always build him a SFF desktop which would be way better than any pre-built laptop you would get for the same price and still be portable if he takes it to a friend's or whatever.'
'Oh yeah that's awesome, he needs to be able to run music stuff on it and he wants to be able to run games on at least medium but otherwise they aren't a priority if it brings the cost up too much. Oh, and USB3 would be nice.'
'No problem, what sort of budget are we looking at?'
'Around £250, absolute maximum is £300.'
'Fuck.'
For this build I decided to go the APU route, simply because a traditional CPU + GPU setup would be too expensive, especially with the additional cost of a small form factor case. The bargain hunting skills I got from my grandmother certainly served me well here though. All the reference prices (RP) are taken from Amazon's prices at the time of purchase.
Case: Bitfenix Prodigy M White: £69.99 RP: £72.95
I got this for pretty much the RP because it was difficult enough to find one in the UK, let alone a second hand one, considered other cases but this was Nep's favourite. Came with 2 Bitfenix silent ball-bearing fans.
PSU: XFX Pro 450W: £35 RP: £35
The reason I went for this one over the very slightly cheaper (£2) and perhaps slightly more reputably branded Corsair builder 430W was because I've had experiences with Corsair builders failing in the past (they use a different OEM for the builder series) but then after some research discovered that the XFX is literally just a re-branded Seasonic, which are often lauded as the best PSUs around. Purchased from Amazon because a.)never buy second hand PSUs and b.)there weren't any second hand ones.
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB: £27 RP: £47
Was originally going to go for a 500GB because it was cheaper than a 1TB whether I went 2nd hand or not, then I spotted this bargainous offering from an Amazon 3rd party seller. It claimed to be manufacturer refurbished and was cheaper than a used 500GB, what's not to like?
When it arrived it looked as though it had been packaged by a chimp. All the protective bubble wrap and foam was placed on top of the HDD with the HDD itself in an antistatic bag resting upon the bottom of a thin cardboard box. Thoroughly braced for it to be dead I plugged it into my PC and lo and behold, it worked and passed all of the SeaTools tests with flying colours. I proceeded to install Windows absolutely fine and copied multiple large files to it without a hitch. Sorry Varrok, I'm sticking with Seagate.
RAM: Corsair Vengeance black 2 x 2GB 1600mhz: £22.80 RP: £42.87
Sniped a bid on ebay to get this price, I bought 8GB of Vengeance blue a year or so ago which cost me £35, RAM has really shot up in price recently.
Optical Drive: Lite-On DVD-RW: £8.99 RP: £13.99
Not much to see here, bought a refurbished drive that wouldn't open so I fixed it rather than go through all the faff of returning it, apparently this is a common issue with lite-on drives anyway. Also the seller told me it was DVD-R only but it wasn't, which is always a nice surprise.
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A88XM-HD3: £44.29 RP: £44.29
Got this from Amazon because it had just dropped in price by £10 and was cheaper than anywhere else, also the best value USB3 FM2+ motherboard I could find.
APU: AMD A10-5800K: £60 RP: £90 (now £79.75)
Originally we were going to go for an incredibly cheap A6 APU, but SlogBait told me he wanted to secretly pay a bit more and get a better chip as a surprise, so we settled on the A8-5600K which was around £64. Just before I purchased it I had a quick look to see if I could get it for cheaper anywhere and found a 6 month old A10-5800k being sold off for cheap by an ebay seller as he had upgraded to a discrete GPU and separate CPU. Snapped it up as it outperformed the now more expensive A8-5600k.
Decided to run it on the stock cooler as we were by now a bit over budget and it wasn't a necessity as I wasn't planning on overclocking it.
Total price of components: £268.07 Reference price of components: £346.41
I moved that bottom fan to the right hand side and flipped it upside down because the airflow was all wrong with it on the left, the rear exhaust fan is a spare blue LED one I had lying around. I also routed the cables better before I put the side back on but forgot to take a photo.
It started up first time, yay! Then the motherboard driver DVD wouldn't work at all so I rebooted and it worked because computers are fuckers.
Plugging the front panel (in this case side panel) cables into the motherboard is my most hated thing about building a PC, the pins are often vaguely labelled and written in about size 0.00000001pt font.
Originally I was going to upload some footage of gameplay but the recording software I used messed up and recorded it really fuzzily. The games I tested ran at a solid 30fps or more at 720p including: Crysis 2(medium), Skyrim with various beautification mods including the HD texture mod(high), Batman Arkham Origins(high), Portal 2(maxed) or at 1080p with a decrease of either one graphics setting level (eg. high > medium) or about -5fps at the same graphics level.
Here's the one video I uploaded before realising it was fuzzy as all fuck.
I gave up my wifi adapter (TP-Link high-gain 150mbps wireless adapter) which Slog is going to pay me back for at the same time as he (generously) gives me some sweet dosh for building the PC. We also organised a courier to pick up the PC as Nep couldn't come and collect it due to complications, it got there just fine the next day. Trying to find a cheapish but decent courier was probably the most stressful part about the whole thing.
Hope you enjoy your PC Nep.
