Hey hey, it’s me again with another small build . And tradition oblige, this build must also bears the name of another character in the Neptunia franchise (even if I have not played the game in years). As it will be a small blackish build, it fits the petite nature of ユニ (Uni).
So my brother is mainly using his PC to browse, along with SolidWorks modeling. His current pc is quite old by now, being the first PC I build for my mom. It as an Haswell i7 along a GTX 760, 1TB SSD and unknown amount of ram. The GPU is becoming a limiting factor as sometime his SolidWorks project chugs (I think it’s mainly because of the meager 2GB of VRAM), and he wants a smaller PC, albeit with a limited budget (max 1000$ CAD).
Hence my crazy ideas come in play nicely. I always wanted to do a build inside an InWin Chopin so it’s now the time to do so! The case is quite small, stylish, and has an included power supply which helps keep the cost low. And there is a Pro variant with a 200W PSU, so power is less of a worry. But the integrated graphics inside a Ryzen APU is a downgrade from a 760, and do not solve the VRAM issue. And normally you cannot fit a GPU inside this case.
You can do like a popular Chopin GPU mod, Pluto, and remove the PSU to fit a low profile GPU, and use something like an HDPlex a external power brick to power everything, but it adds cost to a project that needs to be as cheap as possible. Here comes the RX 6400. Albeit all the critics about the the card, it’s a low profile, single slot, with 4 GB of VRAM, and is power sipping card that is readily available at “cheap” price (looking at you expensive LP GTX 1650…). It’s a perfect fit. A reddit user already did use a RX 6400 to put it behind the motherboard, so the idea is to do the same the same, albeit in a nicer way.
I wanted to buy some used components to bring cost down, but used stuff are not that much cheaper than new, so I will pretty much go everything new, except for the PCI-E 4 riser cable for which I found one that would the bill for cheap-ish (but that would not take a month to arrive). Also, if his SSD (a 850 Pro if I recall correctly) is still in good health, I might reused it to bring the cost of the build down.
Here’s the part list I plan to use:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600G (Cheapest of the 5600s, so why not)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 (Have one lying around without a fan, will look into putting a 120 fan to cool it)
Motherboard: ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming-ITX/ax Mini ITX
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
Storage: Samsung 970 EVO Plus 1 TB NVME (Might not buy it)
Case: In Win Chopin Pro
Case Fan: Noctua A4x10 PWM
I will update on the project. I intend to do it quickly. I will not wait for Ryzen 7000 because anyway the goal is to have a cheap build. A Ryzen 5000 is already quite an upgrade from a Haswell.
(Note: From that build I will recover a EVGA Hadron Air, the first case in which I build a PC for my mom. This case will be reused when my mom will upgrade her PC in the future. Thing might be interesting with that one as I’m not reusing the included power supply (which is like almost 10 years old now))