Two Halves, An Ocean Apart

[Vicarian]

My best friend, who lives in Estonia, recently made some major life changes, which included getting a new apartment.  I tried thinking of a housewarming gift to get her, but quickly realized I have no idea what she'd need or even want given the nature of the move.  Then I settled on surprising her with a new PC as hers is beginning to show its age (i5-7400, GTX 1060).  We're both fans of the Stalker series by GSC Game World and she's going to need a better rig to handle Stalker 2.  Enter the two halves:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/VpDnW4

 

I purchased the motherboard, processor, memory, and SSD here in the United States, and have just purchased the other components from a local shop in Estonia.  The board is built up and tucked away in the retail and Amazon boxes it came in.  It is ready to be packed in my carry on for the flight to Estonia:


 

Note that the SSD is in the second slot because I'm planning on grabbing my friend's current boot drive and installing it in the main slot.  Otherwise I have install media for Windows 10 on a thumb drive, and I'll move the SSD to the main slot.

[OhYou_]

I love Estonia, beautiful country and people. 
Is her current ssd also a 2TB? I always recommend trying to just buy one big drive vs multiple. If her current is less, I would bring disk cloning software and clone her current to the new, then wipe the old and still use it in the pc if you wish. 

solid plan importing the expensive hardware. you should be able to avoid import duty unless you catastrophically spill your spaghetti at the gates. 

[Vicarian]

59 minutes ago, OhYou_ said:

I love Estonia, beautiful country and people. 
Is her current ssd also a 2TB? I always recommend trying to just buy one big drive vs multiple. If her current is less, I would bring disk cloning software and clone her current to the new, then wipe the old and still use it in the pc if you wish. 

solid plan importing the expensive hardware. you should be able to avoid import duty unless you catastrophically spill your spaghetti at the gates. 

I'm not entirely sure of the capacity of her boot drive, and I'm taking an educated guess that it's an NVMe.  I didn't want to ask her too many questions in an effort to keep the surprise, well, a surprise.  I do know that she does have an SSD currently (unknown if it's her boot drive), since I asked her about her processor and the SSD requirement of Stalker 2.  Are you aware of any open source cloning software?  When I searched, I only found paid solutions.

[OhYou_]

assuming windows, It's not open source, but I use a freeware tool called maccrium reflect. it is fairly annoying to get/install the free version, but still doable. I only keep using it because it allows you to clone the system live, meaning while the os is running. 
If not that, DD will clone it 

[Vicarian]

Wanting to make the machine whisper quiet, I ordered some Noctua Chromax Black fans for the case, along with some y-splitters to connect them.  2x140mm up top, 1x120mm in the back, and 3x120mm in the front. I'll intake the top and front and exhaust in the back.

[Vicarian]

Ended up having to change cases.  Went with an MSI Mag something or other off the shelf because the listing on the local shop's site for the P400A was just for a mesh front panel.  Regardless, it fit everything spectacularly.  I'm proud to say this is my most perfect cable management job ever.

[Vicarian]

Finishing up.  My friend gets the honor of doing the peels.

[Vicarian]

And ran FurMark for over a half hour while I made lunch.  GPU topped out at 66C.