I was planning on saving this build for the holiday season, but my 15" Retina MacBook Pro decided that it was just going to stop working one day and left me without a computer for school. I already had most of the parts so after a quick trip to the local Micro Center in New Jersey, I was ready to start building. The build process went fairly smoothly, my only issues being that my liquid cooler did not fit where I wanted it originally (top exhaust), and that Windows did not initially recognize my WD Blue drive(given time, the issue resolved itself). For under $1000, I'd say I did pretty well.
I marked this as both "completed" and "in-progress" because while the system is fully functional and working wonders for me, I would like to make a couple more custom mods.
Parts list:
CPU: Intel Core i5 4690K @ 4.2GHz
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Seidon 120 AIO
Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Anniversary
RAM: 8GB Hyper X Fury DDR3-1866 (Blue)
SSD: Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB
HDD: WD Blue 1TB
Video Card: Nvidia GTX 970 Reference
PSU: Corsair CX600
Wireless Adapter: Intel 7260AC
Case Fans: Corsair SP120, 2x SP140
Case: NZXT S340 Black/Blue
GPU Story:
I found the 970 brand new on eBay originally going for $329 with a "best offer" option. Seeing that I could get a 970 for $329 at Best Buy (employee discount ftw), I decided to low-ball the guy by offering $275 and try to get the price to around $300... He accepted the low-ball...
Pictures:
Plans:
- Custom sleeved cables
- Painting the GPU (I'm thinking painting it black with a blue painted led logo)
- H100i GTX
- Spectre Pros