Last year, I upgraded my main rig (A4-H20) to a more powerful system with the following specs:
- Motherboard: Asus ROG STRIX B650E-I GAMING WiFi
- CPU: Ryzen 7 9700X
- GPU: ASRock AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT Steel Legend
- RAM: G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB 64GB (2x32GB) 6000MHz (bought them for $200, but now they cost $1.2k in my country, wtfff.)
- Cooler: DeepCool LE240 V2
- PSU: Corsair SF850
- Storage: 4TB SSD
This upgrade left me with a few extra components: an RTX 2070 (which I gave to a friend), a Ryzen 5 3600, a B450I motherboard, 32GB of DDR4 RAM (3000MHz), and a 1TB SSD. These parts have been sitting around collecting dust for the last year and a half.
Recently, I realized that ever since I upgraded my main rig, I haven't actually enjoyed gaming on it very much. It sits at my desk, where I already spend all day working. I much prefer lying on my couch and playing games on the living room TV. However, I can't move my main rig to the living room. For one, I still need it for work. But more importantly, even the A4-H20 (11L) is too big for my liking next to the TV—I'm very particular about my interior design 😅.
I also spent a couple of months using local streaming (Sunshine/Moonlight), but the tiny bit of latency always bugged me. One thing led to another, and I ended up building a smaller sibling to my main rig using my leftover parts plus a few extra purchases:
- CPU + Motherboard + RAM + Storage: Technically "free"
- Case: M34—only 5.2L (AliExpress, $40)
- GPU: Asus Dual 3060 Ti Mini v2 (Used, $220)
- PSU: Some Chinese 500W Flex PSU ($45). A bit sketchy for a PSU, but it has worked fine so far, and the stock fan isn't too loud either.
- CPU Cooler: ID-COOLING IS-37-XT + a random Noctua fan I had lying around ($17)
- Chassis Fan: ID-COOLING TF-9215 x2 ($8)
- Total: $330
This setup worked out beautifully, and I've been enjoying gaming a lot more recently. I can play everything I want at reasonable settings at 1080p, and honestly, that's all I need. The case is tiny enough that I can hide it behind decor or furniture, making it almost invisible. After undervolting and tuning, everything runs pretty cool under full load, too. It's literally the best impulse purchase I've made recently, lol.
As a bonus benefit, I realized this build makes things even more worthwhile when I travel. I visit my parents (a 2-hour flight away) a few times a year for weeks or a month at a time. I almost always drop games during this time because I can't play them for weeks. When I return home, I've forgotten the controls or where I left off, get frustrated, and abandon the game completely. It happened with God of War, Black Myth: Wukong, Red Dead Redemption 2, etc. I bought a ROG Ally, but it can't really run AAA titles at reasonable settings, so now that's collecting dust too 😅. So this little build ended up being the ultimate fix: clean enough in the living room, handles my games properly, and is small enough to travel with.
