GOING TO A LAN party? You don't have to lug around a desktop or settle for a subpar laptop. I'll show you how to cram the guts of a gaming PC into a slim case with a MicroATX motherboard.
Choosing the Case and Power Supply
I used In Win cases years ago, but moved on as other companies produced more interesting designs. Recently, though, IN Win has been making seriously good cases suitable for gaming PCs. The In Win Dragon Slayer is one example: IT looks like a full tower case that someone has shot with a shrink ray, yet it's still deep enough for large graphics card.
I used In Win cases years ago, but moved on as other companies produced more interesting designs. Recently, though, IN Win has been making seriously good cases suitable for gaming PCs. The In Win Dragon Slayer is one example: IT looks like a full tower case that someone has shot with a shrink ray, yet it's still deep enough for large graphics card.
One other minor issue is that the the front-panel USB 3.0 connector requires you to route a cable out the rear of the case and plug it into a USB 3.0 back-panel connector on the motherboard.
Selecting the Motherboard
When I set out on this project, the limiting factors were size and power consumption, not cost. I also wanted an overclocking-friendly, gameroriented motherboard. So I settled on the Asus Maximus IV Gene-Z, a premium-quality MicroATX board built around an Intel z68 chipset, four memory sockets, and the usual host of features you'd expect in a high-end gaming motherboard-expect size.
And the Gene-Z isn't pricey. It hovers around $170, which is more than most MicroATX standard ATX boards cost, but less than standard ATX boards of the same class do. It offers on board reset and power switches, a robust BIOS, a high-end power supply section, and plenty of USB ports (including USB 3.0).
The Gene-Z includes Creative Labs THX TruStudio Pro software audio enhancement. TruStudio Pro is one of the few software-based audio enhancement I find pleasing, and it offers a some what broader sound stage.
The board also room for a large aftermarket CPU cooler. I didn't use a highend cooler with the system, but that's because I planned on only modest overcooking
Choosing the CPU and RAM
While the sweets spot for most gaming systems is an Intel Core i7-2500K. The additional base clock, plus Intel's Hyper-Threading, makes this system useful for more than just play.
A good motherboard and a good CPU deserve good memory. I wanted DDR3 that I could rely on to run at 1600MHz, since I wasn't planning on higher memory clocks. Corsair's 8GB vengeance DDR3 kit fit the bill nicely, and it costs less than $60. Fast DDR3 is an incredible value these days.
Picking the Graphics Cards
Although I wanted to build this PC with no set budget, my goal wasn't to construct a machine with an unlimited budget. And since it's MicrATX PC, other constraints influenced my choices,including those for power and cooling. I also wanted a graphics card that made little noise, didn't consume excessive power, and could handle most modern games.
Enter the Asus GTX 750 Direct CU II, which is available for about $350. The first thing you notice is that this graphics card is three slots wide; that's due to the beefy cooling section. Asus has also removed one integrated circuit (including in most GTX designs ) that limits maximum power draw. This tweak allows users to set the voltage to whatever they deem appropriate. (Bear in mind, however, that without the voltage limiter you can wind up killing the card.)
Asus offers an overclocking tool called SmartDoctor, but it's pretty crude. If you really want to overclock the card go to the website for Aus's high-end Matrix GPU series, select the downloads for your windows version, and look under 'Utilities' for GPU Tweak. Although this tool was designed for the Matrix GTX 580 series, it will work just fine with your 570.
If you simply want to push the clock speed higher, GPU Tweak automatically adjusts the voltage. The PC will end up consuming more power, but that's why you build in 750W PSU-for wiggle room.
Adding Storage
Of course, you need lots of fast storage for your games. On the optical side, all you really need for gaming rig is an expensive DVD burner. The lite-On iHAS124 gets the job done, and costs $20.
As for the bulk of the storage, my first inclination was to use a pure solid-state drive configuration, but buying enough space for games would you have almost doubled the price of the PC. Thankfully, one cool aspect fo the Z68 chipset is its support for Intel's Rapid Storage Technology SSD caching. You drop in a small SSD and configure the system for RAID support, and the SSD acts as a huge cache for the hard drive.
So I paired a fast, 10,000rpm Western Digital 600GB VelociRaptor hard drive ($220) with a 20 GB Intel 311 SLC-based SSD ($115). The net result: much faster boot and application-load times than I would have sen from a VelociRaptor alone. If I had built in 600 GB worth of SSDs, they would have cost me $800 or more.
If you crave more capacity, a 2TB , 7200-rpm drive costs about $150, and you'll see nearly the same performance due to the SSD cache.
Performance and Overclocking
Even tough overclocking is easier than ever, keep in mind that it remains a crapshoot. I've always been content to run my systems at standard CPU clock speeds. I have pumped up memory clocks, though, sine DDR3-1600 is so affordable now-tweaking memory bandwidth is sometimes more useful than bumping CPU speeds.
Let's look at the results for the PC I built, based on the standard clock speeds for the CPU and GPU; check out the chart to the left. Metro 2033 is a demanding game, so hitting almost 20 frames per second in DirectX 11 mode with 4x antialiasing and all details pumped up is pretty impresive. In most games, the PC runs in execess of 30 fps, and over60 fps in some titless.
In practical terms you might see a 2 to 4 percent increase in the frames-per-second performance of most game; whether that;s worth risking an overclocking depends on your situation. If my PC always resided in my home, in a controlled enviorment, I'd probably keep the overclocks. If I wantd to carry it around to LAN parties, though, I'd stick with default clock speeds for safety.
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