Its finally come to this, the moment I build my first Steambox and my 2nd PC for myself. Which has been anticipated from myself and even Swaggy for a few months. Now I wanted to build this since I've been playing a bit more steam games lately and also with the former Kodi revolution, watching movies stored locally would look cooler with it. So with a set budget and recent looking into steam machines, I decided to go for a Skylake Mini ITX PC. Costing me under £260 from various companies I deal with in work. It was time to go an build this. There is no build video in this post due to the fact this is to showcase the Parts ONLY. But enjoy a PCPartPicker table of Parts below before I go into detail of why i chose the parts I bought.
PCPartPicker part list /
Price breakdown by merchant
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| The compilation of parts |
Now this one was a almost going to happen. With the Intel Skylakes looking towards the i5-6500K and the i7-6700K for mass consumption, there was a niche for the entry level CPUs, which the G4400 Pentium has been popular since its Intel HD performance was actually playable on newerish titles which was good since If i can mange making my own (sadly its grey key market since getting those companies like
Incomm don't work with Single store business and possibly sole traders) digital game store then I can be able to use it to play the games I sell on there which makes it more of a personal touch. But the 2.80Ghz processor is a decent budget of £35-£40. This did include a heatsink as well since this can't overclock. The full specs are on
Intels website
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| The front of the G3900 |
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| The behind of the G3900 |
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| The top of the box which actually shows this skylake cpu in its real glory |
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| One of the sides of the box which shows feature, Intel quicksync is the key which makes this work nicely, DDR4 memory support is a bonus too. |
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| All of the intel details on the white sticker |
Now this is my most longly anticipated part. Since this was meant to be in the UK 2 months ago but there might of been problems, I did ask for advice (aka a ETA) on the board and one of my suppliers were importing it first. So after confirming to buy it and paying for it a week earlier, the account manager did do a mini mess and ship the other parts i bought since the motherboard wasn't in stock. But it arrived on the Same day as the
LED trainers. But this has some good features. Like a M.2 Wifi slot and also a M.2 slot underneath which makes SSD SATA drives feel like a laptop hard drive that HP just whack in and PC world have the advert saying "Massive" but forget to say that an 4 year older computer with a SSD is faster than that laptop. But the downside is that its not dual bios, even though this isn't due to the Mini ITX space. But HDMI, DVI and VGA is nicely done which is nice for a nice range of monitors for all skills. There is a PCI Express 3.0 slot that makes this ideal for a GPU upgrade on the steambox later on. Yes, i'm not going for a GPU to save money and prove that Intel HD 510 is good enough for budget gamers which might not work but worth it anyway. The USB 3.0 Header is a good deed too.
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| The front of the box. With the Gigabyte feels |
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| The back of the box with all the cool features hightlights and a specs in the bottom left |
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| A clear logo on the side |
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| the bottom of the box with the codes and its name |
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| More inside details on the far back of the box |
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| A sneak peek at the inside of the board. |
Now this is a quick one, since RAM needs to be fast and Corsair Vengeance LPX is the top one for DDR4 and Corsair have a Good support system to be fair, it took me 2 weeks to RMA some DDR2 which i bought in 2011 and had to RMA it early this year. But the heat sink is looking sharp, the 2400mhz is good even though the board will only handle 2133mhz. Very happy for the £30ish mark.
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| Vengeance LPX the front of the box |
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| The back of this box |
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| In its plastic shell |
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| The back with the sticker |
Now we look at this beast. Which was an accidental choice, since my first choice was a Point 500W 80Plus for £25 but i went for a 700w more reliable 80Plus for £20 more. In this case, there is alot more cables on this one than an ITX case should have but it makes this future proof. The thing has a quiet fan unlike the point one would be louder. But the sleek black design is nice, the weight is very heavy which means this could be a very painful smack if used in that way, but this makes this PSU pretty good, this did raise my budget over the £250 mark sadly.
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| The front of the box |
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| The back of the box |
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| The sides are the same but the seal makes it look different |
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| Like i said, same logo, different seal |
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| The Aerocool slogan with a 700 |
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| The inside of the box |
This case is amazing in its concept and luckily i got a really good deal and even built a customer in work a steambox with this case (Yes, this was true and this is working to this day, except he went for a G4400, Asus H110I-PLUS and 8GB Hyper X and 500GB Barracuda) which was very insresting with its PSU at the front and upto 4 3.5" HDD slots as well as that dim in real life but strong blue light in promo images on the front above the USB 3.0 and audio jack ports. There is plenty of room for a GTX 980 to fit in there if you have thinner PSU cables or cable tidy better than myself. Oh and this case is quite light but the top can scratch very easily, Cats are going to have a scratchonbury festival on it.
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| The front of the box, and yes that dent was when it arived |
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| the side of the box, with a clearer look at the perspective of it |
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| The bottom of the box with trademarks |
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| The top of the box with Serial numbers and EAN codes |
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| The other side of the box |
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| The back of the box with the features in detail |
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| The side panel |
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| The other side panel |
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| the back panel, its nice a full height card can fit in here |
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| The inside from the top with the details and screws |
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| a twist of the cables included |
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| The front of the Case |
You can't really say much, but from buying 2 of these before from CCL, they do the job and makes devices fast and easy, ok the 450/450 R/W speed can but the enthusiasts off but for a person that just wants to see an improvement on speed, this is incredible. The packaging is good and pretty clear too. But this drive has done me and customers i've sold these to really well.
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| The front of the box. showing the SSD and the features on it |
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| Enough small print to be classed as an eye test on the back |
This is a novelty piece and I feel i didn't need it but i wanted this steam box too look cool and to be honest when this was fitted (it was in a different position that i would of guessed on the Antec ISK600), it looked like a gimmick that didn't work, but I was wrong, this was bright enough to give me a headache. This is brighter than Christmas tree lights at midnight. For £8 this was nice in price.
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| The front of the packet |
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| The back of the packet |
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| Inside the packet with the molex and a extension cable as well. |
And there we have it, the list of parts and some reasons on why i picked them. Now the build will be in another post so expect that soon.
omracer
