I'm sure I'm not alone here in having family members ask me to build them a PC on occasion. Well, just imagine how that intensifies when you have a closet lined with motherboards, power supplies, CPU coolers and so forth!
The last time I built a PC for mom was in 2007, I believe. The chassis was Thermaltake's Armor LCS - the one with water-cooling built-in. It had an Intel Bad Axe motherboard, a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB of OCZ camo-themed RAM, a 500GB Seagate hard drive and, I believe, an 8800 GTS graphics card. At the time, this was a little overkill, but hey, it's mom we're talking about ;-)
For most of that time, the PC has served her well. She went through one GPU, two PSUs and at one point, the water-cooler died. I've been meaning to build her another PC to properly follow-up to that one, and this past weekend, that's just what I did. Once again, it's overkill for her needs, but like those who own a 4x4 to just drive around the city, she's fine with that.
I generally have certain parts lying around to help with a build, so for her, we just needed to get a chassis, SSD, new RAM and some other odds and ends. Here's the gear all laid out:
In list form, that's:
Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Edition
GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD5 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2400 Processor
Kingston 16GB HyperX 4x4GB RAM
Kingston 240GB HyperX 3K SSD
Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green
Thermaltake Jing CPU Cooler
Corsair HX1000 PSU
AMD Radeon HD 6850
Some random ODD
This is the first time I had a chance to work with a Level 10 GT, so I wanted to talk about it a little bit, because it's awesome.
Look at it! JUST LOOK AT IT. This thing is gorgeous! Sure, not everyone is going to like the white color, but in person it's quite impressive.
As simple as it might seem, one thing I like about the chassis is that it can be secured with the help of a key. Both the main door and these hard drive bays can be locked down so that they cannot be removed or opened. Of course, this means that you -never- want to lose the key. Fortunately, there's a clip on the back where one can be stored (defeats the purpose, but useful if there are grandbabies running around that like to get into -everything-).
The cool aesthetics continues right up on up to the ODD section. Four USB 2.0 ports exist on the front along with the power/reset. Two USB 3.0 ports reside on the top, so there is a -lot- of connectivity potential here.
Glamour shot of the ass-end.
As I built with this chassis, I kept discovering cool little features, like this one:
There are filters on the top, bottom and side that can be easily removed to clean the dust out of them.
The belly of the beast:
The motherboard I chose for this build was GIGABYTE's Z68XP-UD5, which I chose for a couple of reasons. It's feature-packed, looks good and I know I can count on it to remain reliable until the next build. I still think GIGABYTE has some of the best-looking motherboards on the planet.
The hard drive and SSD before going into their respective slots:
Finished build in the next post!
The last time I built a PC for mom was in 2007, I believe. The chassis was Thermaltake's Armor LCS - the one with water-cooling built-in. It had an Intel Bad Axe motherboard, a Core 2 Quad Q6600, 4GB of OCZ camo-themed RAM, a 500GB Seagate hard drive and, I believe, an 8800 GTS graphics card. At the time, this was a little overkill, but hey, it's mom we're talking about ;-)
For most of that time, the PC has served her well. She went through one GPU, two PSUs and at one point, the water-cooler died. I've been meaning to build her another PC to properly follow-up to that one, and this past weekend, that's just what I did. Once again, it's overkill for her needs, but like those who own a 4x4 to just drive around the city, she's fine with that.
I generally have certain parts lying around to help with a build, so for her, we just needed to get a chassis, SSD, new RAM and some other odds and ends. Here's the gear all laid out:
In list form, that's:
Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Edition
GIGABYTE Z68XP-UD5 Motherboard
Intel Core i5-2400 Processor
Kingston 16GB HyperX 4x4GB RAM
Kingston 240GB HyperX 3K SSD
Western Digital 2TB Caviar Green
Thermaltake Jing CPU Cooler
Corsair HX1000 PSU
AMD Radeon HD 6850
Some random ODD
This is the first time I had a chance to work with a Level 10 GT, so I wanted to talk about it a little bit, because it's awesome.
Look at it! JUST LOOK AT IT. This thing is gorgeous! Sure, not everyone is going to like the white color, but in person it's quite impressive.
As simple as it might seem, one thing I like about the chassis is that it can be secured with the help of a key. Both the main door and these hard drive bays can be locked down so that they cannot be removed or opened. Of course, this means that you -never- want to lose the key. Fortunately, there's a clip on the back where one can be stored (defeats the purpose, but useful if there are grandbabies running around that like to get into -everything-).
The cool aesthetics continues right up on up to the ODD section. Four USB 2.0 ports exist on the front along with the power/reset. Two USB 3.0 ports reside on the top, so there is a -lot- of connectivity potential here.
Glamour shot of the ass-end.
As I built with this chassis, I kept discovering cool little features, like this one:
There are filters on the top, bottom and side that can be easily removed to clean the dust out of them.
The belly of the beast:
The motherboard I chose for this build was GIGABYTE's Z68XP-UD5, which I chose for a couple of reasons. It's feature-packed, looks good and I know I can count on it to remain reliable until the next build. I still think GIGABYTE has some of the best-looking motherboards on the planet.
The hard drive and SSD before going into their respective slots:
Finished build in the next post!
