Diamond Cube Content Creation Rig

DiamondRyce · May 4, 2016

Whats up everyone? So the i5 4690k and Z87 motherboard was great and all but I wanted to downsize my rig as well as find a way to buy a i7 for my content creation including streaming to Twitch and YouTube. So I scraped part of the build here http://pcpartpicker.com/b/6qCypg and went along another month long search for parts.

Parts I bought

i7 3770s CPU, Asus P8H67M-PRO,8GB 1600 mhz,Thermaltake Core V21 case.

The Asus GTX 770 GPU was a gift from my older brother and replaced a R9 270 hence the color mismatch.

i7 3770s CPU

I bought this i7 3770s for the same price as the i5 4690k. Considering I am using the OBS software for both YouTube videos and livestreaming etc; the i7 would benefit me more in the long run even though the i5 haswell would have done the job well for most people. This is the low power variant of the cpu but I have no problems with that.

Mobo

1155 motherboards especially in the micro and mini itx variants with the z series chipset has made it super hard to find the board with the right features I needed. Took me over month as the first motherboard I bought was a Gigabyte board but caused me so many problems I returned it back to the seller(more about this soon). Ended up with this Asus board who has USB 3.0 but only at the back hence the front panel adapter.

Ram

Probably my worst decision after thinking my 2400mhz Gskill ares series ram with blue heat spreaders was the main issue in the gigabyte board. Turns out that Gigabyte board refused to boot my SDD in AHCI mode even before I tried to install windows. But this EVGA ram seems like some else made the ram and EVGA just place their sticker on it to make it look nice but it works fine as I just traded ram with a hardwareswapper instead. Need to upgrade back to 16GB Ram as well possibly in the summer.

Case

Welp probably the most unnecessary item here considering my Corsair 200R was an absolute beast of a case. But downsizing to a cube case is fine with me. I finally have a window for the first time on a case as well. Cable management is something I will need to work on even in its limited space. Will keep the stock 200mm fan for now and look at temps and see if I need to replace it with my other 2 120mm sp 120 fans.

TL DR: Downsized my rig to a cube case, moved from a Haswell i5 to Ivy bridge i7 for content creation, 16GB to 8GB due to what I thought was incompatibly but was just a Gigabyte BIOS problem. LGA 1155 micro atx and mini itx boards are hard to find these days and took me over a month to find the one with options. GPU was a gift from my older brother and replaced a R9 270

P.S I also made a video using PCSX2 and trying various PS2 games at various resolutions over the native PS2 resolution. Also since I will be streaming the i7 with its hyperthreading will help me out as well.