Power to the People
Travus got a wild hair and decided to build a gaming PC (at the ripe age of *12*). This was because there are some games that Travus and I want to play that are only available for the PC platform (we've been making due with our Macs for a long time).
Note that our family has been 100% Mac ever since the company came out with the Intel chipset (~2006) which also coincided with me focusing more on photography as the Mac platform was/is much better for such tasks.
Am loathe to own anything that comes out of Redmond when it comes to software (besides Skype), but am giddy at the POWER one can get for the money when it comes to PC-hardware (when compared to Macs).
Could've bought an off-the-shelf-top-of-the-line machine for ~$2k (no doubt saturated with 'bloatware'), but he/we decided to buy the parts separate and have Travus build it and save ~$600 (and be in 100% control of what software is installed from the start). Besides, there is something most-satisfying (from a Geek-point-of-view) in knowing that you're playing on a platform that you built from scratch ;-)
Picture of the final product; main components as follows:
1) Thermaltake Core V1 Mini ITX [case]
2) MSI Z97I Gaming ACK Mini ITX [motherboard]
3) Intel i7 4790k [cpu]
4) HyperX 16Gb (2x8GB) 2133MHz DDR3 [memory]
5) M.2 256Gb Transcend SSD [harddrive]
6) MSI GTX 970 4G [graphics card]
7) Corsair RM Series 650W [power supply]
8) Corsair H80i [liquid cpu cooler]
***Travus gives a: HUGE THANKS to my bro for doing all the hard work before he spec'd out the parts!
Power to the People
Travus got a wild hair and decided to build a gaming PC (at the ripe age of *12*). This was because there are some games that Travus and I want to play that are only available for the PC platform (we've been making due with our Macs for a long time).
Note that our family has been 100% Mac ever since the company came out with the Intel chipset (~2006) which also coincided with me focusing more on photography as the Mac platform was/is much better for such tasks.
Am loathe to own anything that comes out of Redmond when it comes to software (besides Skype), but am giddy at the POWER one can get for the money when it comes to PC-hardware (when compared to Macs).
Could've bought an off-the-shelf-top-of-the-line machine for ~$2k (no doubt saturated with 'bloatware'), but he/we decided to buy the parts separate and have Travus build it and save ~$600 (and be in 100% control of what software is installed from the start). Besides, there is something most-satisfying (from a Geek-point-of-view) in knowing that you're playing on a platform that you built from scratch ;-)
Picture of the final product; main components as follows:
1) Thermaltake Core V1 Mini ITX [case]
2) MSI Z97I Gaming ACK Mini ITX [motherboard]
3) Intel i7 4790k [cpu]
4) HyperX 16Gb (2x8GB) 2133MHz DDR3 [memory]
5) M.2 256Gb Transcend SSD [harddrive]
6) MSI GTX 970 4G [graphics card]
7) Corsair RM Series 650W [power supply]
8) Corsair H80i [liquid cpu cooler]
***Travus gives a: HUGE THANKS to my bro for doing all the hard work before he spec'd out the parts!