Disclaimer - This thread is just a story more than anything else, so feel free to skip over it. The following is a lot less glamorous than most of our PCs, but it made a young kid just as happy!
My girlfriend's brother in high school had been playing LOL (league of legends, its similar to DOTA) with his buddies on an Acer work desktop with embedded nvidia graphics and a Athlon II x2 215 (@2.7 Ghz). This was not producing favorable results. 4 years ago i made the mistake of buying a Dell XPS 730, because at that time I knew little of computers (so i guess i should thank dell for forcing me to change every part myself, i actually learned something). The case itself was absolutely beautiful, an eighth inch thick aluminum chassis with an 80 plus 1000 watt power supply. When i built my own PC last summer, i was unwilling to use the old case due the 75 pounds it weighed with everything installed. The power supply is also non modular and it does not fit in most ATX cases, so i picked up an XFX XXX for my build instead. Anyways, when i heard that he was attempting to game on such an inadequate rig i asked him if he wanted to spend his Christmas money on parts and have me throw them in my old XPS tower. He said yes.
So i set off with 300 dollars to build him a rig that could run the latest games well,or at a minimum that could max out LOL (its a warcraft 3 mod i believe, so its not a tough game). I needed a new motherboard (the work computer used a nonstandard motherboard, or it certainly was not an ATX, MATX, or ITX, and it would not mount in the XPS 730) and a dedicated GPU at a minimum. I also needed ram to replace the 800 mhz ddr2. I decided that i would get these three parts, and just overclock the CPU until he could have my old 1100t. (yes i give my old parts away to my friends, The core 2 quad,dual 1gb 9800s, 8gbs ram, HDD, and CD drive in the dell went to my other friend when i built my own system, provided that he bought a replacement motherboard for the broken dell motherboard.)
I also had the stock cooler for my 1100t laying around, and a couple of green LED case fans from Xigmatek, which i thought i could use to spice up the case.
The XPS 730 is a nightmare to work in. The back panel cannot be removed and cable management tools amount to a few clips above the mobo. Throw in a non modular PSU with every known connector to man and you have a cable nightmare.
The build itself went surprisingly well, and the computer turned out fantastic. I was able to overclock the aging cpu to 3.1 ghz with no voltage increase on the 1100t cooler which while is a horrible cooler was much better than the previous cooler, it at least had heat pipes. The ram also overclocked well to 1525 mhz. It is prime 95 stable. I had to use some weird dell control board for the lights (its underneath the fan housings) and an nvidia GPU according the forums i lurked on if i wanted the original case lights to continue working.
He was very happy that he could now max out LOL, and with all the sales on steam right now, he will most likely pick up some other titles for very cheap!
So here are some pictures of the finished project and a list of the used parts.
Athlon 2 X2 215 @3.1 Ghz (Free)
Gigabyte 970 D3 AM3+ ($90)
8GB Gskill 1333 mhz ram at 1500mhz ($35)
EVGA Geforce GTX 460 V2 (V2 is brand new i believe) ($145)
320GB Seagate HDD 720 RPM (did not consider upgrading with prices right now)(free)
XPS 730 Full tower case (free)
1kw Dell PSU (Free)
Windows 7 home premium (Free)
My girlfriend's brother in high school had been playing LOL (league of legends, its similar to DOTA) with his buddies on an Acer work desktop with embedded nvidia graphics and a Athlon II x2 215 (@2.7 Ghz). This was not producing favorable results. 4 years ago i made the mistake of buying a Dell XPS 730, because at that time I knew little of computers (so i guess i should thank dell for forcing me to change every part myself, i actually learned something). The case itself was absolutely beautiful, an eighth inch thick aluminum chassis with an 80 plus 1000 watt power supply. When i built my own PC last summer, i was unwilling to use the old case due the 75 pounds it weighed with everything installed. The power supply is also non modular and it does not fit in most ATX cases, so i picked up an XFX XXX for my build instead. Anyways, when i heard that he was attempting to game on such an inadequate rig i asked him if he wanted to spend his Christmas money on parts and have me throw them in my old XPS tower. He said yes.
So i set off with 300 dollars to build him a rig that could run the latest games well,or at a minimum that could max out LOL (its a warcraft 3 mod i believe, so its not a tough game). I needed a new motherboard (the work computer used a nonstandard motherboard, or it certainly was not an ATX, MATX, or ITX, and it would not mount in the XPS 730) and a dedicated GPU at a minimum. I also needed ram to replace the 800 mhz ddr2. I decided that i would get these three parts, and just overclock the CPU until he could have my old 1100t. (yes i give my old parts away to my friends, The core 2 quad,dual 1gb 9800s, 8gbs ram, HDD, and CD drive in the dell went to my other friend when i built my own system, provided that he bought a replacement motherboard for the broken dell motherboard.)
I also had the stock cooler for my 1100t laying around, and a couple of green LED case fans from Xigmatek, which i thought i could use to spice up the case.
The XPS 730 is a nightmare to work in. The back panel cannot be removed and cable management tools amount to a few clips above the mobo. Throw in a non modular PSU with every known connector to man and you have a cable nightmare.
The build itself went surprisingly well, and the computer turned out fantastic. I was able to overclock the aging cpu to 3.1 ghz with no voltage increase on the 1100t cooler which while is a horrible cooler was much better than the previous cooler, it at least had heat pipes. The ram also overclocked well to 1525 mhz. It is prime 95 stable. I had to use some weird dell control board for the lights (its underneath the fan housings) and an nvidia GPU according the forums i lurked on if i wanted the original case lights to continue working.
He was very happy that he could now max out LOL, and with all the sales on steam right now, he will most likely pick up some other titles for very cheap!
So here are some pictures of the finished project and a list of the used parts.
Athlon 2 X2 215 @3.1 Ghz (Free)
Gigabyte 970 D3 AM3+ ($90)
8GB Gskill 1333 mhz ram at 1500mhz ($35)
EVGA Geforce GTX 460 V2 (V2 is brand new i believe) ($145)
320GB Seagate HDD 720 RPM (did not consider upgrading with prices right now)(free)
XPS 730 Full tower case (free)
1kw Dell PSU (Free)
Windows 7 home premium (Free)
