WYP
News Guru
Well the past year has been very interesting for me, after being a long time poster and hobbyist news writer here I was asked by Tom to bring News back to the OC3D Front Page, I later became a reviewer for the site and upon completion of my degree in Mechanical Engineering I was offered a full time position at TTL towers itself.
This required me to first move from my home in Northern Ireland and to closer to the Ultra Secret location of TTL towers, which took place earlier this week. Now that I am here, and after setting up my home base of operations, I journeyed to TTL towers for my first assignment.
The first thing I needed to do was build a rig in order to start writing and creating other new content for the site, a simple task you may think, but this is OC3D and things are never that simple here.
The task was simple, build a rig with a small footprint because until we move to the new office space is tight, enough grunt to drive my daily tasks and look tidy enough both inside and out for Tom not to slap me silly.
Upon entering TTL's fables "Loft of Dreams" Tom's old MSI themed Bitfenix Phenom immediately caught my eye, it would suit my needs perfectly, though I will need to make it my own.
This is where the modding starts, but with limited time available it needed to be simple but at the same time adequately distance myself from the average Phenom, even with the MSI dragon decals.
Me and TTL, armed with a drill and a rivet gun decided to do something a little crazy, changing the inverted orientation of the motherboard to a more traditional layout. Can you spot the difference?
With the Bitfenix/MSI Phenom done, it was time to journey back to the loft and decide on what components to fit into this monster.
Obviously MSI was the brand of choice for my motherboard and GPU ever since I had chosen a the case, but everything else was still up in the air.
For memory and Storage Id decided to go for Kingston HyperX and for my CPU cooling and power supply I decided to go for Silverstone, though I did use Corsair SP 120 Fans.
Below is the PC's proposed Spec list;
CPU: Intel i5 4670K
Motherboard: MSI Z87M Gaming
GPU: MSI GTX 960 Gaming (Though this was changed later for a GTX 750Ti)
Memory: Kingston Fury 2400Mhz 2x4GB
Storage: Kingston 3K 240GB SSD
CPU Cooler: Silverstone Tundra TD02-E AIO Liquid Cooler
PSU: Silverstone NightJar 520W Passive PSU
Fans: 2x Corsair SP120 1x Corsair AF120
As some of the Eagle eyed among you may have noticed, there was not very much room for the GPU in this case, since we have modified the motherboard layout. This meant that we had to abandon the GTX 960, since it was far too big to fit, the case was design so that the GPU went above the PSU placement originally.
Instead we dug out the MSI GTX 750Ti out of storage and placed it into the Case, where it only just fitted.
All in all I think that building this PC was a great experience, but not just for the "kid in a candy shop" moment of being told that all of OC3D's parts (within reason) were at my disposal.
To finish off I think that this PC will serve me and OC3D well. At this point all that needs to be done is to adjust the motherboards fan profiles to something more acoustically pleasing. Why did we bother messing with the case layout I hear you ask? It made so much more sense with the CPU cooling, sure it limited us slightly with the GPU but thats an easier thing to deal with than having AIO hoses going over our graphics and it all looking confused.
On my desk i will be using this PC with an ASUS PB278q monitor, corsair sp2500 speakers, a Corsair White M65 mouse and a Razer Arcosta keyboard.
I would love to hear what you guys think of this build and my part selection.
This required me to first move from my home in Northern Ireland and to closer to the Ultra Secret location of TTL towers, which took place earlier this week. Now that I am here, and after setting up my home base of operations, I journeyed to TTL towers for my first assignment.
The first thing I needed to do was build a rig in order to start writing and creating other new content for the site, a simple task you may think, but this is OC3D and things are never that simple here.
The task was simple, build a rig with a small footprint because until we move to the new office space is tight, enough grunt to drive my daily tasks and look tidy enough both inside and out for Tom not to slap me silly.
Upon entering TTL's fables "Loft of Dreams" Tom's old MSI themed Bitfenix Phenom immediately caught my eye, it would suit my needs perfectly, though I will need to make it my own.
This is where the modding starts, but with limited time available it needed to be simple but at the same time adequately distance myself from the average Phenom, even with the MSI dragon decals.
Me and TTL, armed with a drill and a rivet gun decided to do something a little crazy, changing the inverted orientation of the motherboard to a more traditional layout. Can you spot the difference?
With the Bitfenix/MSI Phenom done, it was time to journey back to the loft and decide on what components to fit into this monster.
Obviously MSI was the brand of choice for my motherboard and GPU ever since I had chosen a the case, but everything else was still up in the air.
For memory and Storage Id decided to go for Kingston HyperX and for my CPU cooling and power supply I decided to go for Silverstone, though I did use Corsair SP 120 Fans.
Below is the PC's proposed Spec list;
CPU: Intel i5 4670K
Motherboard: MSI Z87M Gaming
GPU: MSI GTX 960 Gaming (Though this was changed later for a GTX 750Ti)
Memory: Kingston Fury 2400Mhz 2x4GB
Storage: Kingston 3K 240GB SSD
CPU Cooler: Silverstone Tundra TD02-E AIO Liquid Cooler
PSU: Silverstone NightJar 520W Passive PSU
Fans: 2x Corsair SP120 1x Corsair AF120
As some of the Eagle eyed among you may have noticed, there was not very much room for the GPU in this case, since we have modified the motherboard layout. This meant that we had to abandon the GTX 960, since it was far too big to fit, the case was design so that the GPU went above the PSU placement originally.
Instead we dug out the MSI GTX 750Ti out of storage and placed it into the Case, where it only just fitted.
All in all I think that building this PC was a great experience, but not just for the "kid in a candy shop" moment of being told that all of OC3D's parts (within reason) were at my disposal.
To finish off I think that this PC will serve me and OC3D well. At this point all that needs to be done is to adjust the motherboards fan profiles to something more acoustically pleasing. Why did we bother messing with the case layout I hear you ask? It made so much more sense with the CPU cooling, sure it limited us slightly with the GPU but thats an easier thing to deal with than having AIO hoses going over our graphics and it all looking confused.
On my desk i will be using this PC with an ASUS PB278q monitor, corsair sp2500 speakers, a Corsair White M65 mouse and a Razer Arcosta keyboard.
I would love to hear what you guys think of this build and my part selection.
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