Budget mini-itx, what to put in?
So I continued my talks with A about her PC, and it seems that by far the simplest solution for me to build and for her to upgrade will be a regular Intel + Nvidia. For most people this may not be best performance for the money, but she can save some by getting my "old" i5 4670 as I was planning on upgrading to a 4690K when I anyway am going to open my case and mess around in there.
When it comes to the GPU I have yet to find a rear exhaust 750, but I have found some where the cooler fins go along the card, rather than across it. This should cause some air to be vented backwards and directly out of the case - sometimes, good enough is good enough.
Speaking of Motherboards, I think I will stick to the usual suspects, Asus, MSI, Gigabyte etc, and try to find one with the optimal compromise between specs and price.
I haven't nailed down the specifics yet as it requires a bit of spreadsheet tweaking.
When it comes to RAM, one cheap solution might be to scavenge what is in the current PC, although those RAM sticks might not be a very good fit for new machine, but if they are usable then it might just work for now. I have already considered that it might be possible to scavenge some parts, allowing her to save money now and defer some upgrades to when she can afford a significant upgrade. Although I need to pop open her case to have a closer look if this idea is even feasable.
Likewise I am thinking to do the same to the HDD, I cannot imagine the disk being anything else than a regular SATA equipped 3.5 drive, so by all means, it should be directly transferable.
Project: A PC for A
Posted Jul 29 2014 by Esben Sonne