[aotsukisho]

This is the build log of a commissioned computer, based around Intel's Skylake i3 and an Nvidia GTX 1060.


Power supply is a nice and simple EVGA 430W unit, which isn't modular but suits this build fine.


Simple 120mm exhaust fan, and a bundle of cables exiting the chassis. Note that this PSU only contains a single 4+4 CPU plug and a single 6+2 PCI-E plug, which is more than sufficient for this build but it may not be with older cards.


Motherboard is a uATX MSI H110M Gaming


Smart looking board, blacked out pcb and red sockets give it striking visuals


Brains of this build is the Skylake Core i3-6100. Hyperthreaded dual-core 3.7GHz is sufficient for 1080p gaming.


Here is the LGA1151 socket on the motherboard, protected by a plastic cover.


Installing the i3-6100.


Installing the stock Intel "thermal solution" (heatsink-fan). It's around the same size as an LGA1155 i5 heatsink-fan that I had laying around, which hopefully means that this one has a little overhead for some minor overclocking?


As it happens, the GTX 1060 I went with was also from MSI


Similar but not the same color scheme as the motherboard


Skeleteon testbench setup to make sure the system POSTs with no drives connected. Success!


Pulling out my Blast from the Past uATX build from the case I was going to use. This one will go into another, similar, HP case.


Dropping in the motherboard, you can see the single stick of Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM ([email protected])


Two drives going in, a Plextor 120GB SSD for boot/games and a WD 500GB Green HDD for storage.


Everything installed inside the HP case, ready to have the OS installed. Win10 Home disc will be arriving tomorrow, and hopefully at that time the build should be finished.

[aotsukisho]

Sorry it took so long to get these images up, the PC was delivered last weekend.


Win10 installation disc finally in, so it's time to install an OS on this machine


testing with the game this PC was built for, Overwatch of course.

It runs the game on max settings at 1080p at a smooth 60fps, only dipping to around 50fps or so in the heaviest of action.


Also ran the Monster Hunter Online benchmark program, scored a pretty surprising 20.5k seeing as my overclocked i7-5820K and GTX 980ti setup did 32k and costed well over double of this system.


OEM cases have always relied on zipties for cable management, so I decided to go that route again. Since the PSU wasn't modular, I stuffed most of the extra cables in the empty ODD and FDD bays.

This is one hell of a sleeper machine, with a clear upgrade path. Being Skylake, it's roughly comparable to older Core i5 cpus from the early era. It's got a higher boost clock than the i5-2500 Sandy Bridge, uses roughly half the power and performs roughly the same in mildly multithreaded applications. Any other LGA1151 cpu is available, with the next step being an i5-6600/K or maybe even the enthusiast i7-6700/K. Single slot 8GB DDR4 leaves the option to add another 8GB stick for industry standard 16GB, but if it's just for games then 8GB should be enough.

[aotsukisho]

Update to the machine, there was some strange type of hard drive failure as diagnosed through our Discord server. Windows would fail to boot despite being installed to the SSD, except when the HDD was unplugged. We decided that an 'upgrade' was necessary anyway so we went with a brand new set of WD Blue SSD+HDD that was on sale at the time.


Here's the system after a brief shooting of compressed air to clean out the dust


The offending part(s), going to change out both of them just to be on the safer side


Going to give WD's Blue line of SSD a try.


Haven't been a better combo since mouse+keyboard


Reusing the mounting plate for the SSD, the drives are back in the cage


Installed properly back in, and Windows 10 reinstalled.

All critical files and such were recovered successfully. Thank goodness the hard drive didn't catastrophically fail which is usually the case with platter based ones, but the SMART data had a lot of pending sector writes so it may be a good time to retire this 500GB Green from anything critical. This is a shame considering that this drive has less than 9k hours on it, which I would say counts as a premature failure.

PC delivered back to Kibbles and it's running smoothly, if his activity on PUBG last night is any indication.