ALLAN JAMES EDGAR

Malibuware PC Build


Home Hardware Software Venture

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TODO add images and timestamps in order to post update in chron order

After a my brother in law made some pretty serious upgrades to their gaming PC I found myself with a lot of second hand parts. My now fiancee loves to play games despite playing on a laptop with intel graphics. It is always hard to justify splashing out for a new rig so I decided that I would take these spares and build something that could run overwatch without the gun looking fuzzy. The first and largest consideration was the case. One factor that had to be addressed here was that she likes to play in the living room so the case couldn't too big, obtrusive or noisy. The hand-me-down motherboard was full ATX size so we knew that a mid tower case was the lower limit. After a fair amount of deliberation we settled on the Fractal Design Define R5 Blackout as it is well reviewed and has a focus on near silent running. On top of this it has an understated look (altogether too many cases look like spaceships) and had a modular, toolless design which frankly made for an effortless build process.

Among the spare components that I had, I found a relatively old 2.5" 1TB HDD. I benchmarked it on my server system and decided that it would do fine for mass storage. I did however think it would be best to take advantage of the 2 SSD slots behind the motherboard. I had been tempted by RAID for a while so I thought it MIGHT fit the build. The deciding factor was that I noticed a significant speedup on my server boot drive with raid 0. I decided to give the intel software RAID a go. I got 2 ADATA sp550, 120GB SSDs and put the in RAID 0 config (no critical data was going to be on there anyway). Had I been smart I would have benchmarked before and after RAID to see the benefit, but alas, I am not. It worked very well and felt much more responsive, especially considering the £/GB of the system. I considered going bigger and more numerous at the time, but LinusTechTips I ain't. Despite the lack of experimental due diligence, all that needs be said is that it starts up bloody fast, and Catherine is one happy customer.


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