£1500 portable gaming PC build

Shui Mo Qing Hua

Shui Mo Qing Hua

Shui Mo Qing Hua

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18 Jul 2017
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I'm thinking of building an gaming PC for use during uni. It needs to be portable as it needs to be carried around in a suitcase, so an micro ATX case is probably the way to go.

Can anyone help me spec a build for around £1500? Thinking of getting an GTX 1080 and i5 -7600K currently. What wattage would I require for the power supply with these components and do I require cooling(since the case is pretty small and the components are fairly intensive)?
 
it would be a fairly large suitcase, biggest one out of those luggage sets of 3's.

Dimension wise I think it's around 70x50x35 cm?

But obviously the pc is not going to take up all of the suitcase I guess.
 
You'll more likely want an ITX build for transportability. Take a look at the Shuttle XPC range. How will you be transporting your monitor and what resolution is it?
 
Have you considered a laptop? Something like an Alienware can be picked up on the Dell Outlet for around £1500. Keep it whilst your at uni (perhaps even get an external monitor) and then you can always sell it once you dont have to travel around as much and build a desktop.
 
This would be my suggestion. With the shape of a case it should lend itself to a suit case quite well I'd have thought. You've got tons of power inside something like this and there's even another 2.5" drive bay empty for more storage if you need it (the motherboard has a m.2 slot on the back for the NVME boot drive).

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £1,472.47
(includes shipping: £12.60)



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mickyflinn said:
Only back for a few minutes, have you considered AMD Ryzen and do you need wifi on the motherboard ?
Click to expand...
Yes I have considered the AMD Ryzen 1800 and the 1800X, but I feel like Intel cores are more cost efficient as the AMD cores that has similar performance to the i5 7600K is more expensive.

Also I'm not sure about the whole wifi thing - am I right in assuming that you need a separate wifi card which takes up one of the PCI slots on the motherboard in order to connect to wifi? Or you can buy a motherboard that has wifi embedded? Will the integrated wifi be worse than a separate wifi card?
 
Quartz said:
You'll more likely want an ITX build for transportability. Take a look at the Shuttle XPC range. How will you be transporting your monitor and what resolution is it?
Click to expand...

I considered an mini ITX case. However, most of them only contain 2 PCI slots and the graphic card will fill up all of those spaces. Also, there seems to be not much of a difference in the dimensions between mATX cases and ITX ones when I looked up on it, other than the ITX trading PCI slots for additional drive bays.

The monitor will be transported with the case. Resolution will probably be 1080p max (kinda overkill with the graphics card), since the screen can't be too big. (22" max I think)
 
Biz.Kid09 said:
Have you considered a laptop? Something like an Alienware can be picked up on the Dell Outlet for around £1500. Keep it whilst your at uni (perhaps even get an external monitor) and then you can always sell it once you dont have to travel around as much and build a desktop.
Click to expand...

Yeah I started off thinking about getting a laptop. However I own a laptop currently and the problem I have is that I cannot upgrade the components of the laptop. spending £1500 on something that can't be upgraded sounds like a waste of money for me, and I think laptops won't be as powerful as desktop pc's for the same price and they tend to overheat very easily.
(I've never sold old stuff before so I'm unfamiliar with where to go and stuff xD)
 
BinnsY said:
This would be my suggestion. With the shape of a case it should lend itself to a suit case quite well I'd have thought. You've got tons of power inside something like this and there's even another 2.5" drive bay empty for more storage if you need it (the motherboard has a m.2 slot on the back for the NVME boot drive).

My basket at Overclockers UK:

Total: £1,472.47
(includes shipping: £12.60)



​
Click to expand...

Thanks for the information :)

I have a few questions: what's the difference between a 'founder's edition' graphic card compared to the normal one? (And the differences between manufacturers making the same graphics card) Also, if I am not going to overclock my system, where should the single air fan be mounted in the case ?(for the CPU or the GPU?)
 
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Shui Mo Qing Hua said:
Yeah I started off thinking about getting a laptop. However I own a laptop currently and the problem I have is that I cannot upgrade the components of the laptop. spending £1500 on something that can't be upgraded sounds like a waste of money for me, and I think laptops won't be as powerful as desktop pc's for the same price and they tend to overheat very easily.
(I've never sold old stuff before so I'm unfamiliar with where to go and stuff xD)
Click to expand...
I understand, having just graduated from university myself and I too did bring a PC with me and took it home at points it gets very very tiresome. £1500 will get you a GTX1080 and 7700hq which will bench close to if not better than the GTX1080 and i5 you are looking at.
The overheating isn't much of a concern, just use it on a desk and it will be fine. Laptops can be sold anywhere, either locally through Gumtree or something or online, I wouldn't worry about the resell until you need to. Besides, if you are going to be upgrading your desktop, what will you do with the old parts anyway?
 
Biz.Kid09 said:
I understand, having just graduated from university myself and I too did bring a PC with me and took it home at points it gets very very tiresome. £1500 will get you a GTX1080 and 7700hq which will bench close to if not better than the GTX1080 and i5 you are looking at.
The overheating isn't much of a concern, just use it on a desk and it will be fine. Laptops can be sold anywhere, either locally through Gumtree or something or online, I wouldn't worry about the resell until you need to. Besides, if you are going to be upgrading your desktop, what will you do with the old parts anyway?
Click to expand...

I guess you're right about the reselling thing. However I've had a look online and struggled to find laptops of that spec for £1500. Could you give me some recommendations?
(this is just for reference - I'll still most likely be looking for a mini-pc)
 
Shui Mo Qing Hua said:
Thanks for the information :)

I have a few questions: what's the difference between a 'founder's edition' graphic card compared to the normal one? (And the differences between manufacturers making the same graphics card) Also, if I am not going to overclock my system, where should the single air fan be mounted in the case ?(for the CPU or the GPU?)
Click to expand...

The founders edition is just a fancy buzz word for it being the standard nVidia cooler. It's made and sold by them directly rather than being made by another company.

Normally I wouldn't recommend it, but it's the best cooler designed to exhaust hot air directly out the case, rather than using lots of fans to just get it away from the card and then lets your cases airflow remove the residual heat. In such a small case a blower style card like this will keep the rest of your components cooler. It's possibly a fraction less powerful, but your talking a single figure percentage at absolute worst case.

In regards to WiFi you wouldn't need to worry about an add in card on my suggested build as the board has it built in already :)
 
BinnsY said:
The founders edition is just a fancy buzz word for it being the standard nVidia cooler. It's made and sold by them directly rather than being made by another company.

Normally I wouldn't recommend it, but it's the best cooler designed to exhaust hot air directly out the case, rather than using lots of fans to just get it away from the card and then lets your cases airflow remove the residual heat. In such a small case a blower style card like this will keep the rest of your components cooler. It's possibly a fraction less powerful, but your talking a single figure percentage at absolute worst case.

In regards to WiFi you wouldn't need to worry about an add in card on my suggested build as the board has it built in already :)
Click to expand...

Ah okay, many thanks :)

However, I've found another version of the card which was the 'reference blower' for 30 pounds cheaper, and the stats on both of those cards are identical. There's also an EVGA version of the Founder's edition for 30 pounds extra. What's the difference between those 3 cards?

Also is it worth it cutting down the SSD to 120GB and HDD to 1TB, and upgrade the memory to 32GB?

Furthermore is this case okay too for this build?
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/raijintek-metis-windowed-blue-mini-itx-case-ca-008-rt.html
as I didn't find the ultra slim case nice to look at.
 
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Shui Mo Qing Hua said:
I guess you're right about the reselling thing. However I've had a look online and struggled to find laptops of that spec for £1500. Could you give me some recommendations?
(this is just for reference - I'll still most likely be looking for a mini-pc)
Click to expand...
Check out the Dell Outlet, you will find some Alienware laptops. In fact, you also get a 15% discount as a student so that is nice also.
 
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