Crouching Lenovo, Hidden Zotac

ERM64bit · January 21, 2019

This was a build for my co-worker at the hospital who had been toying around with a gaming PC build idea for a while, but hasn't ever built one. It started out as we found a Core i5-6500 in perfect condition that came out of a PC that wouldn't boot from a broken HDD. Since the workstation was marked recycled in inventory, it became the first part of his budget build. After looking through a sea of ITX and mATX cases that he didn't like, we found this Lenovo workstation that was decommissioned for running Windows XP. The front handle was perfect for LAN party travel, so after a few sessions of measuring, I found out it held a standard mATX motherboard and a ATX power supply. So I got to work putting together a parts list that was hilariously powerful for a corporate black box that sat under someone's desk for 11 years. A few caveats while planning this build came up as I worked:

The case only supported 92mm fans, and the MB required a PWM fan splitter
The front panel USB required an extender, and the HDD/Power LED doesn’t work until I can get in and reconfigure the front panel block.
The PSU has to intake from inside the case, so I went with a low profile CPU cooler to make sure there was adequate space for the PSU to intake

Overall though the build seems to be pretty awesome and is able to tear through his entire Steam library. We left the DVD drive in it because it still works and keeps the aesthetics (also he watches DVDs on it from time to time). Right now he’s hunting for some Intel Duo and Windows XP stickers since those came off when we cleaned the case. Also he never told what peripherals he went and got, so I don’t have that info. Without knowing that, the total part cost was $784.36 USD. Considering there’s a 1070 Ti and 16GB of RAM, I thought the build came out great for a budget build. Let me know what you guys think of my first sleeper build!

https://pcpartpicker.com/b/zsfH99

Here’s the link for the PCPartPicker post for the part list.