Hi evryone, I finished my college and am in no need for laptops anymore. So it's about time to make my own build. It's a mini ITX build, so I want to be careful with what I choose, and can use any advice since I have no experience in building a PC from scratch. Below you will see the components I chose with my own concerns and questions. Feel free to add any advice, suggestion and or critic about my build, even of the smallest detail.
So I have waited a little instead of immediately jumping into building, and as of today every single component I want has been announced and should release soon. So note that some of the products I listed haven't released yet, but based on previous iterations it shouldn't be hard to guess if I'm doing something wrong.
So this will be hopefully my mini ITX build:
- Inwin D-Frame mini, miniITX Case
- Asus Maximus VII Impact
- Intel Core i7 5XXX (>= 4.0GHZ. So the successor to the i7 4790K, though I don't need an unlocked one, will see what options will be available)
- Asus Geforce 880 GTX DirectCU II (I have seen a DirectCU II model in a D-Frame mini in youtube, so I suppose it fit's even though the thickness, and website says: Length: up to 340mm,Height: up to 150mm)
- Corsair HX850i PSU 150mm x 86mm x 180mm (is this overkill? I will be overclocking the GPU only. And leave CPU turbo boost on)
- Corsair H100i Water Cooler 240mm (is this overkill? Though it's still a mini ITX board even though the open design, and it fits perfectly on the bottom of the case. And I want to place 2 noctua fans on it, or should I leave the stock fans on it?)
(Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound; Is this necessary? does the corsair H100i have included thermal paste, if so is it good enough?)
- 2x8GB Avexir LED RAM (if I can get my hands on them, pretty rare in my country, otherwise 1866MHz 2x8GB corsair vengence)
- (maybe add 1 or 2 led strips for extra lighting, gotta make it look good behind the glass. I suppose, there will room to plug those in right?)
- Monitor: LG 34UC97 34" 21:9 Curved IPS Display. 3400x1440 pixels 60Hz. (Will the GPU be enough to game on this resolution? 880 GTX will be maxwell I suppose, so more room for overclocking hopefully. And I don't intend to use Anti-Aliasing on that resolution. Perhaps only FXAA when available)
Should I perhaps go With a Custom Water cooling loop? If so I will add the GPU and the CPU to the loop. It will make the build look significantly better, but is the extra price and set-up difficulty worth it?
So these are my part choices so far. Like I said feel free to add any suggestion/advice/critic you have about it.
So the reason why I chose mini ITX is. I have been always a fan of small yet powerful builds, I don't like to see wasted areas in a case. But I do care about looks a lot too, so this case seemed to be a good choice. Normally I would've gone with a mATX board since I wanted to use a dedicated sound card, but the Asus impact solves that with the SupremeFX. So I didn't see a need for a bigger motherboard, since I'm also not into SLI. the price per performance drops a lot imho. And the speed of an SSD is fast enough for me, so a RAID card is also out of the question for me.
Also here is the very 1st build of the Inwin D-frame at computex 2014 with a custom water cooled CPU, and an ASUS Direct CU II GPU
So I have waited a little instead of immediately jumping into building, and as of today every single component I want has been announced and should release soon. So note that some of the products I listed haven't released yet, but based on previous iterations it shouldn't be hard to guess if I'm doing something wrong.
So this will be hopefully my mini ITX build:
- Inwin D-Frame mini, miniITX Case
- Asus Maximus VII Impact
- Intel Core i7 5XXX (>= 4.0GHZ. So the successor to the i7 4790K, though I don't need an unlocked one, will see what options will be available)
- Asus Geforce 880 GTX DirectCU II (I have seen a DirectCU II model in a D-Frame mini in youtube, so I suppose it fit's even though the thickness, and website says: Length: up to 340mm,Height: up to 150mm)
- Corsair HX850i PSU 150mm x 86mm x 180mm (is this overkill? I will be overclocking the GPU only. And leave CPU turbo boost on)
- Corsair H100i Water Cooler 240mm (is this overkill? Though it's still a mini ITX board even though the open design, and it fits perfectly on the bottom of the case. And I want to place 2 noctua fans on it, or should I leave the stock fans on it?)
(Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound; Is this necessary? does the corsair H100i have included thermal paste, if so is it good enough?)
- 2x8GB Avexir LED RAM (if I can get my hands on them, pretty rare in my country, otherwise 1866MHz 2x8GB corsair vengence)
- (maybe add 1 or 2 led strips for extra lighting, gotta make it look good behind the glass. I suppose, there will room to plug those in right?)
- Monitor: LG 34UC97 34" 21:9 Curved IPS Display. 3400x1440 pixels 60Hz. (Will the GPU be enough to game on this resolution? 880 GTX will be maxwell I suppose, so more room for overclocking hopefully. And I don't intend to use Anti-Aliasing on that resolution. Perhaps only FXAA when available)
Should I perhaps go With a Custom Water cooling loop? If so I will add the GPU and the CPU to the loop. It will make the build look significantly better, but is the extra price and set-up difficulty worth it?
So these are my part choices so far. Like I said feel free to add any suggestion/advice/critic you have about it.
So the reason why I chose mini ITX is. I have been always a fan of small yet powerful builds, I don't like to see wasted areas in a case. But I do care about looks a lot too, so this case seemed to be a good choice. Normally I would've gone with a mATX board since I wanted to use a dedicated sound card, but the Asus impact solves that with the SupremeFX. So I didn't see a need for a bigger motherboard, since I'm also not into SLI. the price per performance drops a lot imho. And the speed of an SSD is fast enough for me, so a RAID card is also out of the question for me.
Also here is the very 1st build of the Inwin D-frame at computex 2014 with a custom water cooled CPU, and an ASUS Direct CU II GPU
