Building "The Dream": Rationale

Hi guys, this is my post about how I built my first PC. It is one awesome 4-month long run to earn and build this. Hope you guys will like it.

Parts Rationale:

CPU: AMD A8-6600K

     I was planned to buy an Athlon X4 860K. OutletPC, NewEgg, and TigerDirect doesn't allow using international cards as they thought I'm hacking someone's card. I left with no other option to go APUs considering this is the last piece I'm missing. This was actually the 2nd thing I want to get, but due to bank issues, the money got stuck for almost 40 days. During that timeframe, I already bought the other components I need.


CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper T4

     Considering AMD CPUs/APUs are higher in temperature than Intel's, I need prevent overheating or even reaching 60 degrees. I used an aftermarket Hyper T4 because of its lower price than its brother, Hyper 212X, but performs slightly lower than that. I reached my all-time-low 2.0C on my graphics on idle with this cooler. 


Motherboard: MSI A78-G41 PC Mate

     The first piece I got. During the times I'm prepping my build, I was not clever enough about sockets. I just go aim at everything. My first plan was using FX-6300 at this board, realizing it has different sockets. So, after getting this, I planned for the real thing.

RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury @ 1866MHz

     Since we got a blue-themed rig, why not go with a blue RAM? Also, getting an 1866 MHz RAM means you want speed for your APU. APU's graphics rely heavily on the RAM speed. Whether you have a 4GB, 8GB, or even 64GB, if the speed is low, you won't get good performance on the graphics part. I will be buying another stick with same speed and same capacity to optimize the use of dual-slotted RAM performance.

HDD: Seagate 80GB + Samsung 1TB

     I used my laptop's 1TB as my storage device. I'll move my OS to my 80GB after I study on OS cloning. My 1TB drive already has pre-installed Windows 8.1, and will upgrade to Windows 10 when it is released.

Power Supply: Corsair VS450

     This 450W power supply is perfect for my rig. I was supposedly getting a CX430M but because of the card issues, I got stuck in VS450. I can go with CX500, but considering I'm only using less than 200W of power, the 300W would be utterly useless even I get a GPU upgrade.

Case: Tecware Infinity

     This is a local brand case. Considered as a mini-tower due to its size, but it can fit a standard ATX board. It has quite a ton of cable management holes, 8-pin hole at the top (even though it can only fit one 4-pin at a time), 3 HDD bays, 2 SSD bays, and 2 ODD bays (which I won't be using until further upgrades of needing one).