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Rant: I'm not a PC building enthusiast. In a perfect world, I'd rather get a PC that was pre-built. Why spend over $1k to watch glorified firework? I was about to grab a MSI gaming laptop but they are plagued by overheating issues with the CPU and GPU under full load. Another reason was that Coffee Lake was not available for laptop form factor. So understanding that, I ventured to my first PC build, with the enthusiasm of someone going to a dentist. End of rant.
I happen to have an Ikea Expedit shelf with an extended desktop, so my preference is to build a PC that fits the space of an Expedit's shelf space. So after some preliminary research I decided to go with the mini-iTX form factor. The Tech Buyer's Guru "THE $2,000 ULTIMATE GAMING MINI-ITX PC BUILD" provided me a blueprint of the parts required, completed with instructions on order of assembling parts onto the case. Those instructions are incredibly helpful for a noob.
Build comments:
Even with a big case, the PSU was a tight fit. The case power supply cable was thick and stiff, and to fit into the PSU socket the cable required a tight bend to push the plug in.
Important to wire things in order. There's hardly much room to move around the cables once the PSU and the video card were in.
Took a long time to build because of inexperience. Words couldn't describe the joy to watch the PC to boot to the BIOS on the first run. Not looking forward to disassemble it.
Choice between 7700K and 8600K. Either would have worked, but eventually decided to go with the newer Coffee Lake processor. OC'd to 4.8 GHz in my build.
Thermal paste tube came with the cooler. Fairly easy to assemble.
Plenty of ports available, and with two slots for NVMe SSDs. One of them came with a metal heatsink slot. Overclocking the processor is as easy as one can get with the software that came with the mobo.
The 950 EVO 256GB SSD would have been sufficient, but upgraded to this because of YOLO.
Could have gone with a better video card but my monitors are FHD.
I love this case for the size. It is small enough to fit my Expedit shelf, and yet it is large enough to fit in an ATX PSU and EVGA video cards with dual fans. Assembly is pretty straight-forward with the Tech Buyer Guru's "THE PC BUILDER'S GUIDES: ASSEMBLING AN EXTREME GAMING ITX PC". Enough slots for two HDD's, a SATA SSD and an optical drive if one so chooses.
The case is a black metal box so it doesn't showcase the RGB blings. Probably not a plus to make to the feature builds, but a plus to me for minimizing distractions.
A fully modular PSU does save a lot of space. Not sure if this build would have worked otherwise.
I had this keyboard for a couple days. The keys are round so they feel more like typewriter keys than keyboard keys. On the upside there is a less chance of mistype due to fingers being stuck in between two keys. A good match with the M720 mouse for traversing between devices.
I have had this mouse for a couple days now. A joy to use to traverse between computers. Pretty easy to set up after installing the Logitech Unifying Receiver and Options software. The Flow feature/software provides an impression that I am using one computer with three monitors when in fact you are using a PC with two monitors and a laptop. I could ctrl+c for some text or a screenshot on the laptop and ctrl+v it to the PC.
Difficult decision as the Seagate drives are better priced but reviews on them were mixed. The WD drive hasn't arrived as of this writing.