Hushbuild
Description
I've been a pc gamer for well over 15 years now but never actually built a pc myself so I figured i'd try my hand at it with Skylake. I wasn't desperate for an upgrade as my current computer would have been fine for another year or so but once I got the idea to upgrade in my head it was difficult to get out.
The PC had to fit three criteria: 1. Be small enough to easily move. (Im a uni student and travel a lot). 2. As quiet and fast as possible. 3. Play witcher 3 on ultra at a reasonable frame rate.
Other Thoughts:
Quite easy build, loved every moment of it. If you are wondering why the mobo was so cheap I got three deals on them.
Dabs gave me £20 off if i bought it with a cpu (And i did).
Then Asus were running the £20 off deal for end of year sales.
& then finally quidco gave me (or will give me) 3% of the total dabs bundle + £10 for signing up with them. Yay.
Whilst the aim was to play Witcher 3 on ultra. I will mainly use it to play Supreme Commander using the ForgedAllianceForever client. If you like RTS's you should definately check it out, we have a great active community!
Thank you for taking the time to read this!
Part Reviews
CPU
Great cpu! managed to get a stable 4.4 oc at 1.260v. Stays nice and cool.
CPU Cooler
I was never gonna go with watercooling because I wanted a tower air cooler, but with this cases clearance a lot of them were incompatiable. This was one of the few that fitted perfectly, works great & matches my black and white theme! winwin!
Motherboard
I needed a board that was cheap but good for overclocking on & settled for this. I was nervous at first because all its reviews on newegg are terrible with some even saying that its m.2 didnt actually support pcie without a hyper kit. I got scared when the mobo wouldnt detect my 951 & neither would the windows installation software. I scoured the net for days looking for a solution, all the tech sites and youtube but nothing that they suggested worked. I got the solution by accident by reading an amazon review of the product. Turns out, all i had to do was get a usb boot of windows 10 which would recognise the drive, install on that which would make the mobo recognise it to. How odd. (A good way of getting people to upgrade to it though i suppose).
Memory
Reasonable deal on black friday. Does the job well.
Storage
Use it as a boot drive, tempretures never go above 43 degrees & boot up is 7 seconds.
Storage
I chose these instead of HDD's because I hate the sound HDD's make. Both with be used to store games.
Video Card
Got a decent deal on this on black friday and I really wont need more than 2GB. Its a stepping stone card that im just keeping until AMD's new line up comes out. Plays witcher on Ultra at a solid 40 fps which is a lot better than my previous one playing the game on low at 23 fps haha. I wanted to plasti-dip the shroud white so it matches the rest of the case but even when i unscrew everything the heatsink will not seperate from the bottom part of the gpu. I've tried like 3 times, I haven't missed any screws so I've just given up haha. If anyone has any advice though that would be great!
Case
The second I chose a mini itx format I knew this was the case I wanted. Unique and well ventalited and a great handle to make it easy to move. Attracts dust like a hoover though, thank god for dust filters.
Power Supply
Wanted a quiet, semi modual psu with a good build quality. Be quiet! met all of these easily.
Operating System
Bought windows 7 but upgraded to windows 10 as I previously said. No issues with it apart from it enjoys making firefox crash a lot. No a clue why.
Case Fan
wanted a better intake fan than the LED 140mm the case comes with that was black.
Case Fan
The phantek ones I've actually got arnt on pcpartpicker so these were the closest ones. At first i was gonna go with some Nannoxia ones that could push more air & were 8 decibels quieter but they didnt match my build sooo. Do regret it a little bit though as these phanteks are louder than i thought they would be.
Keyboard
Wanted a mechanical keyboard with cherry mx blues, only issue is the red Leds so i keep them off.
Mouse
Great mouse, nice and solid. Black and white so fits my build perfectly.
Comments