I mentioned a few weeks back I was considering my choices for how to upgrade my aging computer equipment, and of the choices, building my own custom PC would be the most rewarding path to take. I swithered a bit on whether I really wanted to do this, but in the end I gave in to the temptation to build something entirely my own.

Great, I know what I want to do, now how do I get there? It’s been several years since I built a PC1, and I haven’t been keeping up with the trends, or what’s the latest and greatest in terms of performance, price, or anything really.

I had a few ideas of what I wanted – it needed to be small, as space in the office is at a premium. It needed to be as powerful as I could afford, so it would last a decent amount of time until it needed major upgrades, while being flexible enough to tackle many different types of task – development, gaming, photo (and potentially basic video/audio) editing, for example. In a perfect world, I wanted it to be as quiet as possible and look good.

The last few weeks have been spent doing research, going back and forward over potential configurations using PC Part Picker before settling on an outline of what I wanted. I took it over to /r/BuildAPC for a sense check, and was told my best bet was to change the graphics card for something more powerful than I had picked out. I rejigged a few things to make that possible, and ended up with the spec below:

TypeItem
CPUIntel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor
CPU CoolerCooler Master Nepton 120XL 76.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
MotherboardAsus MAXIMUS VII IMPACT Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard
MemoryCorsair Vengeance Pro 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1866 Memory
StorageSamsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5″ Solid State Drive
Video CardGigabyte GeForce GTX 960 2GB Video Card
CaseSilverstone FT03B-MINI (Black) Mini ITX Tower Case
Power SupplySilverstone 500W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular SFX Power Supply

The graphics card might still be swapped for another, similarly specced one, but otherwise this is what I’ll be building in a little over a week’s time, when I have some time off. I’ll be talking more about the build, closer to the time, as I have a few things planned which will make it a bit more interesting than just a straight PC build


  1. It was in 2008. I checked my order history. ↩