A Decade of Battlestation
Apr. 10 2015
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I've spent the last 6 months or so upgrading bits and pieces to get where I'm happy with my setup for a good little while. This clean and (mostly) tidy configuration is small, but don't let its looks fool you -- this is a power house of functionality.
Let's take a look at what's in here:
- Acer XB270HU -- Unbelievable. 144hz, gsync, ips, huge res. Just...amazing.
- Corsair Obsidian 250D Mini ITX Case
- Asus Maximus VI Impact Mini-ITX motherboard
- Intel i7-4790k (4ghz, quad core)
- EVGA 970 FTW
- 16GB Ram
- EVGA 1200 watt powersupply -- Overkill, by far, by I wanted to keep it quiet and in the high efficiency range
- Crucial 512GB SSD -- Actually, 4 of them in RAID10
- Corsair H100i Cpu cooler plus replacement Noctura fans
- Mionix NAOS 8200
- Microsoft Ergo 4000 -- I'd like to try mechanical keyboards, but I can't get over the shape comfort of this guy.
- Sennheiser HD 598
- and some greenery to spruce things up a bit
As you can see, I'm not skimping on power in this tiny case -- but what's great about most of these parts is that, at low usage, the fans all turn off and the system uses relatively lower power. But when it's time to fire up the games I want to play, they absolutely scream.
Finally, with a child in my life now, you can see how I went to some effort to get everything lifted off the ground as much as possible and zip-tied out the wazzo. Well, actually, you can't see almost any of the zip ties and that's rather on purpose. The only small mess on the left side there is 1) spare power cables for when I work from home and 2) an "in leg" spearker wire for when I had speakers mounted that aren't currently in use.
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The rear panel where the black tube lets out all the individual connections. You can also kinda see where I clipped a piece of the fan grating out so I could wire the BluRay drive in via the eSata.
The desk itself is a nearly 10 year old Ikea Jerker. And yes, still the best desk ever.