Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler New HTPC/Gaming Rig Build

So here's the current part list of the machine I'm building for my living room. Its primary use will be media playback, and gaming.

It started with me seeing that SilverStone had announced a new Mini-ITX case, the Raven RVZ01. I knew I wanted to build a machine using that.

So I found a Mini-ITX motherboard. I had never used a Asus board in a machine for myself, but I've been impressed with their stuff for a long time, so I figured I'd give the Z87I-Deluxe a shot.

When I was initially planning this build, I was going to try to go cheap, and use a Core i5 CPU, but cheap started to go out the window, so I moved up to an i7. There's really only one i7 chip available to consumers, the 4770. Though there is also a clock-unlocked version for a few dollars more. So I figured what the heck, and will be using the Core i7 4770K processor.

Some more SilverStone stuff to fill up the case:
Power supply: ST45SF-G (I hope 450 Watts is enough, as it's hard to find SFX style PSUs bigger than that).
Short, modular cable set: PP05-E
CPU heat sink: NT06-PRO (I've heard this is a real bear to install, but blood sacrifices make computers run well).
Slot load, BD burner: SOB02

I'm going with SSDs for the main storage. Yes, plural. I'll be using three 240GB Intel SSD 530 Series in a RAID0 stripe set (720 GB total). This should get me about 1.6 GB/s read performance. (This is where cheap left the planet.)

Because I know better than to trust an SSD (even in Intel one), and striped drives are playing with fire (if even one disk fails the whole set becomes unreadable). I'm going to put a Seagate ST4000DM000 (their site is all HTML5/AJAX, and you can't link to individual drives any more), 4TB low-power, spinning disk in for backups, and storage of larger files.

I'm still not sure what video card or RAM I'm going with. I'd like to use a GeForce GTX 760, but the minimum recommended PSU is 500 Watts. I'll probably risk it, because the rest of the system doesn't seem to be too power hungry. For the RAM I want something that's DDR 1866, and CL 9, probably Crucial or G.Skill. But I've got to see what clearance I have with that CPU cooler. I think there's no overlap between the DIMM slots and the radiator, but have to see it in person before I order anything.