Once upon a time, I owned a pretty decent high end (for the time) gaming system. Towards the end of last year I sold the parts and replaced everything with a singular MacBook Air base M4 base model. In the last month or so Hytale finally released as an early access title after many years stagnating in the background, and while the MacBook handles everything I throw at it day to day, having a secondary system for more intense applications such as some games without the cost of an Nvidia GeForce NOW subscription seems to make sense.
With this system I did not want something high end and expensive to buy and run - my day to day is still general browsing, watching YouTube/listening to podcasts and learning new Tabletop Roleplaying Game systems as well as creating one-shots and modules for them. There are many places I could get the hardware from, whether that be somewhere like eBay, CEX or Cash Converters online - I do however, have a very good friend who happens to have some parts that would make this idea become reality.
Enter my good friend Tom (Taspeed), fellow co-host and builder for our Hytale server project (more on that in another post sometime). He happens to have the parts I need to begin this project. So, let's begin with the specs:
CPU: Intel i5-11600
Motherboard: Gigabyte AORUS B560 Pro AX
RAM: 16GB DDR4
Graphics Card: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER
PSU: Corsair CV450
You might notice that the case and storage drives are missing - and you would be correct. To begin with, I have multiple drives lying around, some very old so I am unsure if they even work anymore, this will be a good time to test those! Now onto the case. Tom sent me a 3D print project to download for an ATX Open PC Frame which will be a perfect fit for it to be mounted onto and then placed on my 3D printer desk, either on the top alongside the printer or under in a small compartment (assuming it fits).
All of the parts printed.
I will be posting some photos of the finalised build over on my Pixelfed in the coming days or so once it's ready - we're awaiting on some fittings so Tom can finish building the frame. In the meantime though, I have been messing around with the hardware itself and running it on the top of my 3D printer desk for the time being.
Fedora Workstation 43 is my choice of distro, I did try CachyOS at first but decided quite quickly to move over to a "mainstream" distro for ease of any troubleshooting I might need to do later on (I'm not using Arch... by the way). I installed a SATA M.2 SSD with 256GB of storage for the OS (in the middle of the 3 M.2 slots as the top slot is a PCIE Gen 4 so I am saving it for a much better - and larger SSD later) and a secondary 2TB SATA 2.5" SSD for games. As would be expected, it's all working well, and now just waiting for its frame so it can be placed in its final place.