Parts arrived, so I am simultaneously putting it together and text flirting! Mini computer is very difficult to assemble due to all the tiny freaking parts. I will update with pix when I get closer to completion.
be very careful angling the video card in. small cube computer requires lots of careful cable running and cleanup with twist ties/cable ties since upgrading the video card or cpu requires much disassembly.
i threw together the one in the antec isk 300-65 super easily but still waiting for delivery of the video card for my sg05 cube build.
my xfx black edition 6850 won’t fit because of the bracket underneath the gpu chip touches the kozuti fins. urgh.
ergh, those two hours fiddling with mounting the cpu heatsink were the most harrowing 2 hours of system building.
How do you install Win 7 on an optical drive-less machine?
via usb drive. microsoft offers isos for download and a software tool to make them bootable.
anyways, i got a slim laptop-size (overpriced) for it anyways and that was another hour wasted threading 4 teeny tiny (eyeglasses-sized) screws through the bay that has holes for them to fall through and onto the floor.
@rei doing a great job with the update tweets, keep it up! #building-a-small-gaming-computer-again #qt3
DIAF, hong :) point taken though. i’ll shut up.
Don’t shut up completely. I want to know how it turns out!
I got it working today. Not to jinx it but I think my silent gaming cube dream is coming to fruition finally after joining SPCR in 2004.
download the legit iso here and use with the official microsoft tool
this assumes you have a legit serial.
It’s alive!
Slipstreamed USB 3.0 drivers into the Win7 install thumb drive and a timed install was done in 6 minutes.
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It took like four hours to get mine together, but I’ve been using it with no trouble since then. My score is virtually identical to your sans HD, where I take a beating, but that’s like totally irrelevant with 8gb of ram.
I’m really enjoying going onto that canyourunit site, popping in a random modern game and finding out that I am massively beyond the reqs. Which is a nice change.
It was a pain getting the Win7 iso to boot (had to use a skeezy Russian program that worked BEAUTIFULLY after seeking for something for hours), but Ubuntu was trivial (and worthless to me). Once I got the usb to work as bootable, the install was (mostly) painless, except for the part where I had to download and install drivers for everything, including the networking gear. Which sucked, but whatcha gonna do.
I actually have to take my machine apart and rebuild it again due to, uh, finding some screws that are yellow and thus should probably be attached to the motherboard like right away unless I want some fried board up in my bidness. I’ve been tinkering with the insides, so I can now tear it down and rebuild it in under an hour which is good.
Side note, that blue LED light raped my eyes until I unplugged it. Holy shit. Do not connect it if you get this (WUNDERBAR) box, it will skullfuck you in the dark.
Other side note, FANTABULOUS for HBOGo show watching. I’m on a Band of Brothers kick and it is awesome.
Box itself is very tight, I made some big dick little hole jokes when I saw all the stuff I needed to put into it. But it weighs nothing even when fully built, and I can easily move it to/from tv room for screening shows. Considering hooking it up to the screen for absurdly huge screen with Civ5. Bet that would make nukes look awesome.
I’ll link all the updated drivers I found–the ones on the Asus website are worthless.
Here is the finished result:
I have to disassemble and redo the cooling since I am doing 50-60 idle–it may not be on right. I currently have thrown another 120mm fan in there not held into place by anything just sitting on top of the giant heatsink pushing air down.
Damn, that’s attractive.
I demand you call it the rei-beast so I can be like stusser.
Looks like the Silverstone SG08 (successor to the longer/deeper SG07 case that can take a Radeon HD6970) is the same length but has a nicer/subtler front: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ygokobAfAe4#at=74