The PC started with my main laptop dying. The graphics card died, however the SSD and the screen were still fine.
I bought a motherboard, CPU, RAM, PSU and GPU. and designed the case around the size of these components. I based the design on the typical wooden engineers toolkits.
As well as the odd bit of CAD and photo editing I also do quite a bit of gaming, in a way it was an opertunity as my old Thinkpad really wasn’t up to playing the latest releases. The idea behind the engineers toolbox form was that it would be a ‘luggable’ computer, in that it would be east to carry from place to place.
A potential issue is heat and power. I designed it around a small form factor power supply,
and the most powerful one I could find is this seasonic 350w model.
it was listed as modular, however all the connectors all forked off the same plug, so it seemed a bit pointless.
As for power/heat I chose the CPU and GPU with that in mind.
The CPU is a 45w model, the i7-4790t, I theoretically could have got the unlocked 4790k and underclocked it,
but I wasn’t sure the motherboard I had bought supported this.
The GPU I chose was a GTX970, this was the best combination of power efficiency, actual GPU power and form factor as I found a shorter ‘mITX’ model. From the reviews the similarly sized AMD Nano would be more powerfull processing wise, but blow my power budget (and actualy budget).
I also bought a LCD driver board off ebay so that I could use the old laptop screen as a normal monitor.
