Hi folks,
Being a first-timer in PC building, here are some of my personal thoughts.
I have decided to lay my hands on the
Dan Case A4SFX v2, though I know that building into a mini ITX case could be quite overwhelming for a first-timer. However, the slick and minimalistic look of the Dan case is just really attractive and I'm personally impressed by the logical arrangement of standard components in such a tiny case. For the final assembly, I put on the standard metal side panel at the GPU side for better intake of air, while using the window kit at the CPU side to show off the internals. There are plenty of exhaust holes on the top of the case for effective cooling.
For the motherboard, I went with the
Ausu ROG Strix Z370-i, a fantastic board with dual M.2 slots, great storage expansion, nice build quality and massive heat sinks. The only complain I have is that I hope the WiFi antenna could be screwed onto the board directly.
After doing some research, I decided to choose
I7-8700K as my processor, pairs with a mainstream
Cryorig C7 CPU Cooler. Yes, I understood that K model has higher TDP of 95W than the non-K model in the line-up, which may cause some problems in my thermal management. However, I also have learned that by doing some tweaks to my CPU could help me to better cool this CPU even under load, such as undervolting. I wish I could do delidding, but it might be a bit risky for a beginner like me. The K model would give more flexibility in the future event of possible overclocking. Although Cryorig C7 runs loud under load indeed, I personally felt that the noise level is bearable. However, for sure it looks much better than its main competitor Noctua L9i. To further improve the temperature, I chose the
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut as my thermal paste, I think the Conductonaut might be a better option, but I'm just a little uncertain to work with liquid metal.
Next, I chose 16GB of
ADATA XPG Spectrix 3200 DDR4 Ram, which comes with Aura Sync to gave my build a bit more RGB essence. For storage, I chose
Samsung 960 Evo 256GB as my boot drive and
Western Digital Black 512 M.2 as my randomly accessed storage drive. Nothing too fancy, just try to cut down the cables in the build. May consider adding a 2TB 2.5'' HDD into the build later for file archives.
Due to the recent rise in Crypto Currency, the price for GPU is just insane. The
Palit GTX 1070 Ti Dual shares quite some similarity in appearance with PNY. Palit might be a rarely listed brand, but I can't say no to such a reasonable price. Ultimately, it's still a GTX 1070 Ti, isn't it? Anyway, I may switch to GTX 2000 series once it is released.
The PSU in my build is the
Cosair SF450, a well-known SFF PSU. Although I did receive advice on getting a 600W option, after doing the power calculation on PC Part Picker, I felt that 450W is good enough, since I don't plan for any overclocking as for now.
On a side note, at this point in time, a 92mm
Noctua NF-B9 redux 1600 PWM is waiting to be installed to provide a bit more airflow in my case, hopefully, a small drop in temperature as well. In addition, I'm also planning to do cable mod. I only have 3 power cables running through my case, which is very nice.
So, this is the entire selection of my first PC. I'm pretty happy with how it turns out. It's only 7.2 litres and 4.3 kilograms. I did undervolting to both CPU and GPU with Intel XTU and MSI Afterburner. The performance is not bad. In Cinebench R15, it scored around 1450 for overall CPU test. In 3DMark Fire strike, it scored around 17500. While 8700K is running at a max of 1.09v, 1070 Ti is running at a max of 0.850v. They clock at 4.3GHz (6 Cores) and 1810 MHz respectively in game (eg. PUBG at 2560x1080), while temperature stabilizes at 74 C and 76 C respectively. Lastly, I ran Aida64 overnight for 12 hours to ensure the stability of the system. I'm intending to borrow a FTX 1080 Founder's edition to see whether there could be temperature improvement.
Alright, maybe my choice might not be the wisest and my build might not be perfect, it is no doubt a fun experience. Hoping my build log could offer some help to others' build
If there are suuggestions, please offer to me as well.
