Building with the finest Chinesium

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budget build with the power on

Im going to detail it later, so all of this will change, but I was back in my favorite “junk” mall and a few places are selling new kit!

So I thought I’d do one of the Xeon boards up with what I thought looked good, but new. However they don’t offer remanufactured GPUs so the Radion 200 something is a used card I picked up for $350 Hong Kong dollars.

1920×1080 @ 88FPS! Very auspicious!

While I’m not the biggest fan or all that knowledgeable about ATI/AMD GPU’s this Radeon R9 200 (something) seems to perform okay. At the least it ran FurMark for a minute without catching fire.

Going with this idea, that means the PSU, case, motherboard and all in one liquid cooler are brand new.

I think the overall cost should be below 200$ USD but I need to go through my receipts and check. Although it is a cheap build for sure. More than enough punch for excel, and enough graphical punch for some gaming.

While not the cheapest case, the aigo Mini case was the least terrible looking one I could find. And at $160 HKD, that puts it in at around $20 USD. Nice

For cooling I found the Alseye H120 cooler for a cool $280 HKD or about $35 USD.

While I’ve used multiple AIO’s before this one really didn’t feel all that different from the rest. And it was the cheapest one I could find.

Contents were pretty much what I’d expect. The cooler block, radiator, and some adapters and whatnot to connect it to the CPU. What is nice about this one is that it includes mounting hardware and explicit ability to mount to the socket 2011. I’m pretty sure that this AIO is technically cheaper than the fan kit I have on my dual processor board.

I picked the 550 watt ‘POWER COM’ GTR power supply, since they bothered with a box. There was a 650 that just came plastic wrapped for cheaper, although I think I should have gone that route.

PSU Wired in with an adapter to drive the video card, and although only half of the secondary CPU connector has a plug in it, the board still powers up to POST.

While the machine does power up, I really have to wonder about the overall power budget. But this is a cheap machine so…. I’m more so happy it powered on.

And amazingly the machine not only powers up, but after a few minutes inside the BIOS the CPU is running at a cool 21c. Nice!

So from what I can recall:

  • Motherboard / CPU / RAM 450RMB
  • Case $160 HKD
  • PSU $150 HKD
  • GPU $350 HKD
  • AIO $290 HKD

So this puts me at a mere 187 USD. I could have gone cheaper with a discount air cooler, and a very simple 2D graphics card. But I was thinking of going with the ‘best of the worst’ type thing, so that means going with the water cooling, and the best looking graphics card I could find on the cheap. As you may have noticed storage is missing as I had expected some M.2 drives to have arrived by now. But for sub $200 prices this little box packs quite a good little punch.

6 thoughts on “Building with the finest Chinesium”

  1. so you bought the chassis in new golden center, right?
    BTW GTR power supplies are always in low-tier and IMHO it is better to replace it with better PSU (for example, SeaSonic, Antec)

    • My expectations are pretty low. I’m more surprised that it worked.

      I got this stuff in the new capital Plaza, it’s one block away from the golden centre. I find that although there is a lot of stores they all seem to have the same things, and I end up going to comdex too often..

      I just landed in Tokyo (the plane is still taxiing), I’m planning on hunting down more GTX 980s. I always wanted a monster SLI system. Oh and new capital Plaza has a bunch of 1200 (or were they 1500?) watt mining PSUs. They can’t be that old, and at $200 HKD it’s pretty cheap!

      • new capital plaza are the place mainly selling 2nd hand/refurbished computer/network parts in a somewhat higher than taobao prices. and the chassis may come from a shop which is 2 floors above the ground in new capital plaza, mainly selling computer box fans and heatsinks as I remember the text shop owner writes.

        • The biggest problem with Taobao is once they see a Hong Kong address, either they won’t ship, or they play games. My storage is in Duanguan for CNY as they thought that was close enough.

          I swear it can be so annoying

    • Well you were right, I ran FurMark and it blew up the PSU. Bolts of electricity shooting out the back, and blue smoke. I opened it up, it kind of looks okay, but no way I’m trusting it again. As soon as the GPU got into the 80c range, I was expecting throttling, not explosions.

      I’d bought some ANTEC PSU’s after you’d mentioned this, so yeah, out the GTR’s go. Such a shame, they seemed at a good price point, but obviously they cannot handle any real draw.

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