Built a new Machine for my father to be able to use his new VR headset
My family carried me through my college years financially. In particular my parents provided me with health insurance, car insurance, and phone service for all of my college life. At a certain point the expectation was for me to start paying my share because I had a part time. This was all well and good up until the point I was unable to do so. They never did cut me off though no matter how many months in a row I missed paying them they kept up on these bills.
When my Father mentioned he wanted a new computer to use for his virtual reality headset I jumped at the chance to do something to return the favor to him. I offered to build him a computer that would accommodate the VR Head set he bought.
Purpose
My dad bought the Acer Windows Mixed Reality Headset Model VD.R05AP.002 and it would not work on his current machine because it requires both a modern CPU and graphics processor. He brought it over to try it out on my machine and afterwards he decided he wanted to keep using the VR headset and needed to replace his over 7 year old desktop. I was happy to build this for him as it gave me freedom to build anything as the only requirement was it needed to be compatible with the windows VR headset. The only other guidance I got was he wanted a window into the insides of the build.
Parts List
Here are the parts I used for my build thanks to PCPartPicker Part List
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 7 2700X 3.7 GHz 8-Core Processor | Purchased For $343.40 |
| Motherboard | ASRock X470 Master SLI/AC ATX AM4 Motherboard | Purchased For $140.00 |
| Memory | Team Dark 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory | Purchased For $164.50 |
| Storage | Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive | Purchased For $210.00 |
| Video Card | Gigabyte Radeon RX 580 8 GB Gaming 8G Video Card | Purchased For $320.00 |
| Case | Fractal Design Focus G ATX Mid Tower Case | Purchased For $54.50 |
| Power Supply | EVGA SuperNOVA G3 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply | Purchased For $70.00 |
| Case Fan | Noctua NF-A8 PWM 32.66 CFM 80 mm Fan | Purchased For $19.99 |
| Total | $1322.39 |
Parts Explanation
There were a number of options with this build. The only thing I knew I was going to use was the Samsung m.2 NVM-e SSD. These were brand new when I made this build and are super fast. Normally I would constrain myself to a mini ITX motherboard. As this was for my father I did not have that constraint and I did not want to burden him with only having one PCI-express card. Also finding a case that included a window limited my case choices immensely. I have had good experiences with Fractal Design cases including both the Node 202 and the Node 304 a usually are pretty solid. The Fractal Design Focus G is no exception plus it included the window into the interior of the build.
As with any build one of the first choices one must make is Intel processor or AMD processor. This choice is becoming harder and harder with the rise of Ryzen. My dad did not care much about which one so I shopped around several different motherboards to make feed into this decision. I am always looking for the best deal on parts even though that was not a huge concern of my dads in this case. This was most of the motivation for choosing AMD for both processor and graphics card. The comparable intel processor was around $50 more and The 2nd generation Ryzen chips had just come out and by all reports were excellent.
The next choice one must make is either Nvidia or AMD graphics processor. I hemmed and hawed about this choice but it again came down to price. Nvidia GeForce cards are super high priced. When you compare the AMD card I picked to the Nvidia card of the same tier, the Nvidia card was easily $100 more. The other parts chosen for this build were picked for no particular reason, just highly rated and of good quality based on the reviews.
Build
This build was really straight forward. The motherboard, included Wraith Prism CPU cooler, and graphics card all light up this build. I did not customize the color scheme but the default color swirl looked pretty cool so I imagine you can do some neat color combos. This is the only build so far that I have not used a separately purchased CPU cooler. From what I have read the prism cooler holds its own.
My father has been pleased with this build. It allowed him to explore using the VR headset and is a huge improvement over his aging desktop. He continues using it to this day.
Date Build Completed: May 30, 2018