Building a PC

I finished University last year and wanted to finally build a PC for myself. It had been a long time coming but I had enough moolah to go ahead this time. I was already familiar with PC building as I had built my parents a desktop some years ago. I had also done repairs and RAM & SSD replacements on my own laptop.

Being a student, I had limited funds so after being intrigued by Linus Tech Tips Scrapyard wars series I decided to save some money by mixing and matching some new parts with some second hand.

After doing my due diligence, I decided to buy new anything that would last through various upgrade cycles of the system such as the CPU and GPU. I decided that the case, CPU cooler and drives as the only things I would seek to buy new. As for the rest of the system, I would head to the second-hand market and hustle for some parts.

As well as doing this second-hand hustle I also wanted to build some extra PC’s with ‘old’ hardware for as cheap as I could (we’re talking 2009/10 parts here) so that I could have a couple of spare computers for testing software and abusing when testing security tools.

The first order of business was to re-acquaint myself with the PC building scene i.e. to see what the latest and greatest technologies were, learn part compatibilities and so on. It should be noted that where I am situated in New Zealand, if you want to buy local, there is a significant hike in price compared to places like the USA. If I was to buy on Amazon, there would be a few weeks wait and once the item is above a certain amount, we have to pay GST tax (15%) on any imports which invalidates any cost saving in most cases.

I decided to buy local because I’m impatient and its less hassle when it comes to warranties for new parts. There are always deals going on certain weekends or times of the year e.g. Black Friday so there are always opportunities to save a buck.

The Case

Looking around the web for cases I found myself drawn to NZXT cases. The silent H440 case was a bit expensive so I gravitated to the S340. The only negative I saw in this case which held me off for a while was the acrylic side window which many people have said scratches far too easily. Then, I saw the S340 elite, the more expensive successor which was to be released in a few months. As soon as I saw it, I was sold. The tempered glass window, HDMI passthrough and VR headset holder (doubles as a headphone holder) were the only real upgrades over the s340 but that was enough for me. I put in an order in for whichever computer hardware store planned to stock it and waited a few weeks for the thing to get to NZ.

And yes, it’s a fantastic case, easy to build in and the cable management is good. The airflow is good enough as are the two stock fans that come with the case. The dust filters on the front and bottom under the PSU are great. And, the tempered glass is awesome. Easy to clean, mounts very easily. The PSU shroud is excellent, hides any loose cables for non-modular power supplies and the drives can be displayed front and centre if desired. I will be keeping this case for a long time. I would recommend at least a 240mm radiator to cool the CPU if you want to reduce the noise. Keep in mind the case was designed with a radiator in mind.

CPU & Motherboard

Before hunting, I didn’t have a strict plan for going red or blue team or what generation and model of CPU to get. I just knew that I wanted something in the range of an i5 i.e. at least a quad core or above to handle any gaming and productivity tasks I could foresee myself doing.

At the time of my build, Ryzen was not released so after some research I was pretty sold on getting an Intel CPU, preferably a Haswell (4th Gen) or above depending on price. In the end I saw a really good condition Intel i5 3570k for a fantastic price so I jumped on that. It would let me try my hand at overclocking if I ever found the need to learn it, and I planned to get an AIO cooler further down the road so cooling would not be an issue. To date, it performs excellently and it hasn’t skipped a beat for my workflow.

The only problem I found was after jumping on the CPU deal, finding an Ivy Bridge motherboard turned out to be a real pain. I had to wait many weeks for a good enough board to support overclocking in my local second-hand market. I ended up paying more than I would have liked for a second-hand board, but got a really good (for the time) Asus P8Z77-V PRO which is a full size ITX board with plenty of space for PCI express cards and plenty of fan headers. Most importantly, it has USB 3.0 (one of the main reasons I didn’t go lower than Sandy Bridge). I do enjoy ASUS products (and they have good BIOS software) so I was happy to get this. I had to order a backplate off Ebay but once that arrived, it was perfect, with one exception. I’ll talk about that further on in the post.

RAM

It was 2017, I knew I wanted at least 8GB of ram. In hindsight, 16GB would have been better but at the time I knew I didn’t desperately need it for my use cases. There was no crazy shortage at the time so prices were still reasonably. I wanted to get a reasonable brand for this and ended up finding someone selling a brand new unwanted 2x 4GB kit of Kingston HyperX Fury 1600mHz ram on the second-hand market for cheap so I snatched it up. It has worked fine so far, but I am starting to feel the need for 16GB for running my many virtual machines when learning information security tools.

Update It’s 2019, I run a lot more VM’s these days, so an upgrade to 16GB was necessary. I went with the exact same specced RAM as I already had (you will run into issues if you mismatch RAM) and it works perfectly.

GPU

This one took some thought. There were a lot of 7000 series AMD cards on my second-hand market and quite a few 700 series Nvidia cards. The AMD cards tend to run quite hot and a lot of them had been used for mining which was a bit of a turn off.

With the recent release of the Nvidia Pascal cards, I knew getting my hands on of these would be a good buy. I started looking at the Nvidia GTX 1050ti as this provided a solid value for money and would do 1080p High / Medium gaming for most modern titles. The AMD RX 470 had better performance and a similar price, but less availability. I was also open to a Nvidia 900 series card, but with the power and performance leaps in the 1000 series cards, it seemed the better buy.

In NZ, these 1050ti’s were hellishly expensive new, and as they were so new, the second-hand market wasn’t much better. So, when I saw someone drop a 1050ti for a great price, barely used as they had upgraded due to needing more display ports, I haggled down and jumped on it in a flash. It’s a slightly overclocked Gigabyte variant with two fans but runs straight off the 75watt PCI express lane and has served me well with no issue.

Storage

There are always hundreds of drives on the second-hand market, but many of them are 5+ years old. For safety, I wanted brand new drives and, like I mentioned, these would last an upgrade cycle. I already owned an Intel 730 series 240GB drive that I had in my laptop which I would wipe and use as my boot / frequent programs drive.

The intel drive is amazing, I managed to get one before they effectively doubled in price, but they have excellent durability and data loss prevention built in. Not the fastest SATA drive, but bulletproof for reliability. I replaced this drive in my laptop with a Samsung 850 Evo 250gb.

For data / games storage, I found an absolute steal of drive on the second-hand market. It was brand new, but the seller didn’t want it and therefore listed it at about 30% of the MSRP. It was a WD 1TB 5400rpm 2.5inch laptop drive but it suited me fine as it would only be spinning up for games and data storage. In future I will add to this with a / a couple of desktop grade drives.

Update Added another 1TB WD Blue 3.5inch drive for flexibility.

Cooling

As I mentioned, the case came with two stock fans as exhaust in the rear of the case. I did not have the AIO until much later so I also purchased a NZXT FX 140mm fan which acted as the intake fan the front of the case. It was a loud bastard, so I was more than happy to replace it when there was a deal for the Corsair H100i v2 at one of my local computer stores a few months later. The AIO came complete with 2 fans which I again used as intake which pull air through the radiator and into the case. As many reviews will tell you, it is an excellent cooling solution, temps are low and the v2 version even has an RGB logo on the CPU block.

PSU

For the PSU, I wanted a reasonable brand and at least 500W to have enough headroom for my parts plus any additions in the future. 600W would be even better. 500W would have been fine though as the 1050ti only draws 75W, and the graphics card usually can eat quite a bit of power. This is why the pascal cards are so good, they are much more power efficient than their predecessors. In order to find good brands I used a Tom’s Hardware guide (old list is gone, new one here). This helped immensely to weed out the crap brands. My eventual supply, Zalman, was high enough on the old list for me to be comfortable to get it.

As part of hunting for deals, I found a seller selling a Cooler Master case paired with a Zalman (I believe it’s a GV although I couldn’t find it on PC part picker) 600W Bronze rated power supply. It was a good deal for just the PSU but I also wanted the case for my other spare PC builds. The Zalman PSU is not modular and the cables are rainbow ones, but my case does a good job of hiding the extra muck. With a bit of cable management, it is very serviceable. As for the PSU, it hasn’t skipped a beat and it is as quiet as one can ask for.

Peripherals

My peripherals were all bought at different times. I used to have a cheap Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard combo, but over time I have upgraded to far better ones. FYI, Logitech makes amazing mice and keyboards. Speakers too. And lots of other stuff. So, over a long period of time I’ve picked up the Logitech MX Master, the Logitech G610, the Logitech Z313 2.1 Speakers, and a steel series mousepad. I also own various headphones for different use cases.

The mouse, the MX master is absolutely amazing. There is a second gen one out now, but I have the first gen. It is big, but super comfortable. The ergonomics are amazing, the scroll wheel is amazing, the buttons are amazing. I have nothing bad to say about it.

The keyboard I picked up recently. I wanted to try a mechanical keyboard as I was sick of typing on a cheap standard wireless one. I researched and found that cherry mx browns were a good starting point into the mechanical keyboard world, so I got a keyboard with them. It also has white backlighting (I don’t care for RBG, not for the extra price premium anyway) and good media controls (which I wanted). The sound is not too loud and the feel is awesome. Typing is far less error prone than on the old keyboard. I will definitely stay in the mechanical camp for the foreseeable future.

As for my speakers, I’ve owned a set of Logitech 2.1 speakers for about 6 years since university and they are just fine. Nothing more to say. Better speakers are on the future wish list, but these are perfectly good enough for now. I can say though that I can never go back to built in monitor speakers or similar. Dedicated speakers are a must.

As for a screen, I have had an AOC 23inch 1080p monitor for a few years prior that I used to connect my laptop to when doing university work for more screen real estate. This was perfectly usable for the new build and I’m still happy with it. Bit of light bleed in corners, but a good enough panel.

Extra PCs

I managed to build two extra PC’s at the same time, half for fun and to see how cheap I could build something functional and half to have a couple of burner machines to play around with. For the first I picked up an AMD Phenom II X4 920, a Silverstone 500W PSU, a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard, an EVGA GTX 560ti, a WD 250GB 3.5ich Hard Drive and 8gb of supposed Samsung DDR2 Ram. The case was a Cooler Master N200 which I got with the Zalman PSU. The AMD CPU ran super-hot so I picked up a DeepCool Ice Mini to help it out a bit. Only 4gb of the ram ended up working, but it still ran fine. This PC runs windows 10 and still plays older games fine and performs normal tasks well.

As for the second system I got an Intel Q9400, I share the Silverstone PSU from the other system, a Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3L motherboard, 4gb Corsair DDR2 Ram, an Antec One case, a WD 160GB 3.5inch Hard Drive and some small Dell low profile 256MB proprietary graphics card that I hacked to fit the case. This PC runs ubuntu but I tend to use it less often as I prefer to use virtual machines on my main PC.

Problems

Some problems I encountered:

The built-in Asus P8Z77-V PRO board audio would not work with Windows 10. I tried the latest board drivers and the default windows drivers to no avail. Thus, the solution was to get a cheap soundcard. I settled for the Asus Xonar DG. The first one cost me $20NZD second hand and lasted about a year. I now have a new one which cost me $50NZD. These cards are old but still sell well and have a lot of availability here in NZ and elsewhere.

As a side note, the built-in audio on modern motherboards is usually good enough these days in terms of sound quality (even for gaming) so if you’re building a new PC a sound card is an afterthought unless you are an audiophile or want to drive some powerful headphones.

Non-modular power supplies are a pain in the ass for cable management. Lucky the NZXT 340 Elite has a power supply shroud to hide the mess.

Second hand items may or may not last – it’s a risk and there are no warranties (unless the item is relatively new) so do your due diligence.

Software

I run windows 10 pro on my main PC, another copy of windows 10 on one of my spare PC’s and Ubuntu on another. On my main machine I also run virtual machines for Kali Linux for my security learning, a ubuntu VM for web development (or otherwise use the windows subsystem for Linux) and other miscellaneous things and another windows 10 image for a disposable testing machine.

Finished build as of early 2019 (with dust).

With all said and done, here is my system as of Feb 2019 on PC part picker for the curious.

PC Part Picker Build