Cheep vr modded pc build

Pandora · July 23, 2018

A few weeks ago i decided to make myself a dedicated vr pc with some parts I had on hand.

To make it a little challenging I decided to give myself a theme.

I decided to go with shadow priest because that's what I mained in wow.

Anyway my budget was 350ish $

I already had the cpu, storage and raman I7 3930k a 120 gig ssd and a 2 tb hdd, lastly the ram was some genaric green and blue hynix crap. Off to eBay!

I picked up a corsair 850w psu for 40$ (wasn't really Comfortable with the 500w psu I already had for the hardware)

I grabbed an R9 290 that was used for bitcoin mining but still had the stock bios and then flashed it to an R9 290x (I replaced the thermal pads and paste) 120$.

Deep cool cpu cooler for 20$ new off ebay.

Cm masterbox td500 case for 76$ (comes with 3 rgb fans and an awesome cut acrylic side pannel)

My hardest choice was the motherboard, even now x79 motherboards are expensive ranging from 230$ to 450$ and most of them wouldn't have fit the color scheme of purple and black

So I bough a Runing (yes Runing) x79 generic motherboard. It's some sort of hunan clone. 150$

Everything arrives and i go about testing the components to find the motherboard is dead. A chat with the ebay seller and a new one arrives working perfectly although the box is soaking wet.

As I dink around with the system on a test bench I realize that I can't overclock the processor. Some googling tells me I need to flash it with a Russian bois so I do that. Now I got the cpu at a nice 4.3 ghz stable.

Next it's time for painting. Anything that can be removed gets painted a nice purple.

I bend aluminum flashing and cut it to size to make heat sinks for the ram and secure it with some thermal tape.

I paint the cable cover in the case, the pcie slot covers, the motherboard heatsinks, the top plate of the cpu cooler, replace its 2 blue fans with a white one and set it all to dry.

Today I went to install the system, f me the motherboard is longer then standard atx!

It's okay no problem, I have a dremel. It's a masterbox, everything is secured via screws right? Nope rivets everywhere. After removing like 12 rivets I cut a slot for the bottom quarter inch of the motherboard to fit in the psu cover.

I reattached the psu cover with gel super glue.

This case has alot less cable management then i thought with all those rgb wires and redundant molex cables from the psu.

Once the motherboard and psu cover are in everything goes smoothly and i have to say I'm in love with the thing. I wish I was better at photography so I could have shared better pictures and i wish I took in progress pictures.

Anyway