GAMING PC! Or: how to make a decent system look as ridiculous as possible

aisle9 · March 7, 2019

A couple weeks ago, I picked up an ASUS H81M board to go with my G3258. I quickly realized that this was an ASUS prebuilt board...and ASUS doesn't put overclocking features on their prebuilt boards. It was an ADUD. Coincidentally, last week I stumbled across an i3-4160 at a local shop, and nabbed it. Also last week, I found an ASUS H81M board guaranteed to overclock and grabbed it. Which left me with a dilemma. Do I try to sell the non-overclockable board and i3 separately on eBay? Or package them with some RAM and try to sell everything as a lot? Or...do I do something......awesome?

My base components:

My case:

Working inside this thing is going to suck. No room for cable management, no drive cage to speak of, and plenty of sharp frickin edges to get tetanus from.

Let's find an SSD:

A 120GB SSD is great for booting into Windows and...well...booting into Windows. Additionally, there is exactly one front panel USB port on this case, and it doesn't work. Let's solve both the storage and front I/O problems all at the same time, shall we?

Yes, I am aware that I installed the hard drive backwards. Yes, I realized it when I was like, "where the f are the SATA connectors?!". Yes, I had to take the thing apart and reverse the drive.

Time for a graphics card. A GTX 1050 will do quite nicely.

Put it all together (except the 380W SFX power supply that blocks the view) and this is what you get:

The wifi card was replaced with a USB expansion card, because the motherboard only has two USB ports on it. That's four total, and that's not enough. Adding four more from the PCI slot is a huge boost.

And there you have it, a GAMING PC!

Kind of looks like he's smiling. Temps are fine under AIDA64 load (66-72C), Heaven behaves like you'd expect a GTX 1050 to behave. Stable 45-60 FPS at 1080p high. It's scraping the minimums for Apex Legends and probably wouldn't be a great experience at anything more than the lowest settings, but Fortnite, CS:GO, GTA V? Oh hell yeah, you're solid. The GAMING PC! will be sold off in short order, possibly in a different case and without its unique character, but I had fun and got great laughs out of this quick and dirty build, and I hope you did too.