{"id":20583,"date":"2014-08-04T21:17:45","date_gmt":"2014-08-04T13:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=20583"},"modified":"2017-02-25T12:03:03","modified_gmt":"2017-02-25T04:03:03","slug":"computer-assembly-2014-edition-part-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2014\/08\/04\/computer-assembly-2014-edition-part-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Computer Assembly \u2013 2014 Edition \u2013 Part 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

Earlier post in this two-parter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A desktop PC would have easily been able to hold a solution that was quick, offer storage solutions as large as its case can hold. Except that if the thing was possibly gonna go into a TV console, I was going to be limited by how big the case could be; especially along the height and depth dimensions. Of the major casing manufacturers, many offer their own unique line of mini-ITX casings. After a lot of exploration, the ones I shortlisted included the Elite 110<\/a> and also the SilverStone Sugo SG05<\/a>. Of the two cases, the Elite 110 was a little taller and wider – which were fine – but more seriously, deeper – which while would have meant a very tight fit into the TV cabinet with very little clearance for cables. The SG05 was a much more comfy fit, though also a less-widely carried model at Sim Lim shops. Very nicely too was that the SG05 was able to hold video cards of up to 10″ in length. It wouldn’t fit the fastest cards that money can buy, but pretty decent solutions nonetheless of the GTX X<\/em>60 variety.<\/p>\n

The rig as configured from existing and new parts from Sim Lim were:<\/p>\n

Silverstone Sugo SG05 Mini-ITX Black Casing<\/strong>. The casing wasn’t of the screwless variety, The casing offered space for an SSD, a 3.5 inch HDD, and even a slim DVD bay (unused after assembly).<\/p>\n

Silverstone SFX Series ST45SF-G 450W Gold series<\/strong>. Not much options here, as I needed a slim-profile PSU. The casing actually comes bundled with a similar wattage PSU but of the bronze rating, but that was out of stock too. So, paid a little more to get a more power-efficient and higher-rated PSU.<\/p>\n

Intel i5-4460<\/strong>. Slightly less quick than the i5-4670 that’s in the desktop rig. I’m not intending to do photo editing or video rendering on this machine though, so a slower i5 was just fine.<\/p>\n

Xigmatek Praeton LD963 Low-profile CPU Cooler<\/strong>.\u00a0 A normal full-sized CPU cooler wouldn’t have fitted in!<\/p>\n

Asus H97I-Plus Mini-ITX motherboard<\/strong>. I was originally intending for a H87i motherboard but that wasn’t available at the store I was picking up the bundle from, so went with the newer and very marginally more expensive H97i board.<\/p>\n

Kingston DDR3 1600 MHz 8GB RAM<\/strong>. Went with the cheapest 1600 MHz value-RAM I could find.<\/p>\n

Western Digital 4TB Green HDD<\/strong>. I’ve had a lot of luck with the Western Digital Green HDDs, compared to the couple of Seagate Barracudas that all failed because of (apparently) batch issues at manufacturing. I swapped this HDD for an older 2TB drive from my desktop rig though – 2TB should suffice for the moment. Added one of my spare OCZ 160GB SSDs to it as the primary bootup drive.<\/p>\n

Palit 2GB DDR5 GTX760<\/strong>. The same card to my desktop rig.<\/p>\n

Microsoft All-in-One Media keyboard<\/strong>. Compact keyboard with a built-in trackpad. Would had been perfect – were it not for that there’s no function-lock key. Arrgggh.<\/p>\n

Casings in this class are very compact, which meant very tight quarters to mount components, cables and connectors around. Still, after a couple of hours installing Windows 8.1, and transferring nearly a TB of family video and pictures, the unit was good to go.<\/p>\n

\"The
Installing stuff onto the primary drive of the SG05.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Cable
Cable management? What cable management LOL.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Installing
Installing Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, just for the heck of it. Check out the download speed: not quite 1 Gbps and just a shade under half that as the connection has gone through two routers before reaching this PC – but still very good for our family’s bandwidth needs.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"The
The rig sitting inside our bedroom TV console.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The first TV that gets the honors in hooking-up is our Master Bedroom’s TV panel – the old Panasonic Viera plasma 46″ from our Rivervale home. Oddly, though the Viera supports 1920×1080 resolution, I couldn’t get it to display at that resolution without losing about 5% of its left and right edges, resulting in a very odd though resolution of 1768×992 resolution. Tinkering around the Viera options though revealed a 16:9 Overscan option, and disabling that from the default enabled setting sorted the 1080p problem nicely.<\/p>\n

\"\"
All done and finally ready for an Assassin’s Creed IV: Blag Flag stress test.:)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier post in this two-parter here. A desktop PC would have easily been able to hold a solution that was quick, offer storage solutions as large as its case can hold. Except that if the thing was possibly gonna go<\/p>\n

Read More Computer Assembly \u2013 2014 Edition \u2013 Part 3<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20593,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,526,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-at-home","category-new-home","category-toys-technology","wpcat-6-id","wpcat-526-id","wpcat-16-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/08\/blog-OL6A6210.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20593"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}