Micro ATX Gaming Build

[Geofrancis]

its that time of year again. time for a new computer! i sold my watercooled quad core itx machine so now im left with just my server as my main computer but a dualcore, 2gb ram and a 9600gso just is not enough.

so i have been researching building a new computer for a couple of months about how to build this for the least amount of money and still having an upgrade path.

i was looking on ebay for a cheap quadcore. there are alot of cheap phenom quadcores but they are slow and hot so i knew it would have to be a athlon II or a phenom II but the cheapest one you can buy is a athlon II x4 620 and thats £80 but i knew i could do it cheaper so eventualy i came across a cpu on ebay called an athlon 64 x2 5000+ that was pretested to unlock to a phenom II x4 +6mb l3 for £35 so i snapped that up and went looking for the rest of my components.

my next step was getting a motherboard it had to meet 4 criteria to be usefull to me:-

1 it had to unlock the extra cores and l3 of my processor
2 it had to take ddr2 as the cpu i bought only supported ddr2
3 it had to support a phenom x6 for when u upgraded in the future.
4 it had to be micro atx format.


the only motherboard i could find that done everything i needed was the ASRock N68C-S UCC but it has a couple of shortcommings that i can live with the main one is that it is only pci-e 1.0 because of the old nvidea 610i chipset so my graphics will suffer slightly but im not to bothered and it will only take a 95w x6 cpu but i can deal with that when i get there
i managed to get one for £27 inc delivery off ebay.

the case i was wanting for this build was a coolermaster elite 341 because its micro atx and would take 120mm fans on the back front and side so it would be very quiet but they dont make the case any more

so after checking ebay i found one that was very similar

it takes a 120mm fan on the front and side a 92mm fan on the side and a 80mm fan at the back so its pretty well ventilated for a micro atx case.
so far i have spent
£27 motherboard
£35 CPU
£27 Case
£30 500W PSU
£14 OCZ heasink
£ 8 Fans

i have still to get 2x 4gb ddr2 800mhz, 9800gx2 graphics card and probibly a x-fi sound card

 

[Geofrancis]

ok my power supply, heatsink and cpu arrived and i dont some quick tests while im waiting for a windows disk to burn

cpu stock Athlon 64 x2 5000+

cpu with UCC enabled Phenom II FX 5000

now that im sure all 4 cores work ive done some quick overclocking tests in the bios to see what i could do

2.758 ghz @ 250 htt stock voltage

3ghz @ 275 htt 1.4v

not bad a 3ghz phenom x4 for a £36

 

[Geofrancis]

my new 500w power supply and ocz heatsink

 

[Geofrancis]

and with all the fans that i will have in it i needed a way to control them. i have my secret weapon a m-cubed T-balancer! it will let me control 4 fans independenty from either sensors on either the motherboard, graphics card, 4 digital sensors or 4 analong sensors

 

[(FIH) The Don]

the gladiator is an awesome budget cooler

but wtf i that psu? i have never seen it before, is it good enough to run the gx2?

also you should paint the case black inside,

helps alot on looks lol

 

[Geofrancis]

the gladiator is an awesome budget cooler

but wtf i that psu? i have never seen it before, is it good enough to run the gx2?

also you should paint the case black inside,

helps alot on looks lol

its supposed to be a very good powersupply for the money http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/668 so it should run the gx2 ok. if the case had a window i would have considered painting the inside.