System… ASSEMBLE!

Soldato
Joined
29 Jun 2005
Posts
4,690
Location
London
Well I should’ve known, after being happy with my mITX system for about 2 years, the decision to add a graphics card has had the knock on effect of an entire system upgrade!
First there was the new case, to go from 120w to 200w (although the case PSU turned out to be 300w!), this enabled me to add a Sapphire HD6570 1GB GDDR3 card.
It should’ve stopped there…
But now I’ve started selling my old kit, grabbed 4GB DDR3, and an i5 2400 CPU from the MM, plus a new motherboard from OcUK.
Installation is tonight, all that is left of my old system is the HDD!

Oops!

Not a bad bit of business though, once all my old bits are sold, the upgrade will have cost approx £120 in total.
 
I'll see if I can get some pics up once I'm done, but I'm out for the next couple of evenings, so I won't get to finish until the weekend. It's built, but my case doesn't support a slimline drive, so atm the lid is off the system and the slimline drive is hanging out while I use it to install W7 and a few games.

I bought the passive Sappphire Ultimate to start with, but then found that the low profile claim is an outright lie, the heatpipe makes it into a full sized card, Sapphire must know this too as they don't even bother including a LP bracket for it. So that went back and I went for one of these instead:
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=GX-263-SP

Surprisingly, the new case is only slightly larger that the BM648, it says 200w PSU in the blurb, but the PSU itself has 300w written all over it!
http://www.in-win.com.tw/products_pccase_series.php?cat_id=1&series_id=67

The case is nice and compact, but the blue LED is bright enough to burn your retinas out!

So now my system is that case plus:

Asus P8H61-I Intel H61
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-482-AS

Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-257-CS

Intel Core i5-2400 3.10GHz (Sandybridge)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-362-IN

Old 320GB 7200 SATA2 HDD

Clearly when I've got a bit of spare cash I'll be investing in a small SSD as a boot drive. Its just a shame that the small case limits my GPU so heavily, especially with the vast overhead I have on that 300w PSU.
The space for a GPU is VERY single slot too, so any heatsink needs to be the same height as the slot. A shame really, because the BM648 had good space for a dual slot LP card, but the PSU would never have been able to handle it.
 
Depends how much you want a larger GPU, I've seen some chaps who have literally cut a hole in the side of the case so their GPU cooler can hang it all out.

I wouldn't fuss too much about it, keep thinking on it and you'll do what I did and end up ordering a double slot low profile 6750 from the US and start dremelling to fit :eek:

In theory I still have some room on the PSU budget in my case for more anything, mines a 220W and current budget is:

65W: i3 2130 (3.4GHz dual core)
86W (maximum): 6570

So 69W for mobo, optical and two drives

So as this theory of mine goes I could risk things and go for a 95W CPU and leave 39W of the budget for drives and motherboard. Something like a i7 2600.

Of course that would be outrageous and faster than most computers 8 times its size so I'm definitely going to do it at some point :D
 
Last edited:
Back
Top Bottom