If you consider yourself a gamer, you are probably in the middle of a game right now. Taking a break, or maybe your computer just crashed and you are in the search of a new one. Well if your computer crashed during a game, I really am sorry to hear that. If it does it all the time then maybe it really is time to upgrade your power a little bit, gotta keep up with the competition, don’t you? All of the parts here can be bought seamlessly and quickly from NewEgg, just click the picture of each item and you will be directed to that items page. It’s quite, easy, and of course, for a great price. Let’s try to keep this one under a grand, and also let’s try to keep it under 30 pounds. That is definitely a lot lighter than my computer, which case weighs in at 50 pounds alone! Here we go!
Case – 13 Pounds – $80
Everything needs to start with a frame. Something that will hold everything that is to come. Something that is sturdy, and does what it is made to do. In this case we are looking for something that is, essentially, geared towards lanning. Thermaltake has been creating excellent products for years, and this is one of those excellent products. Thermaltake’s LANBOX Lite is perfect to show off to your friends, and also perfect for the traveling PC gamer. From Thermaltake, a company that has remarkable cooling products, you can only imagine that amount of vents and fans that are correctly placed to keep your precious hardware cool and keep you above the rest of the pack when it comes to performance. Sporting a cool side window and some sleek blue LED fans, your friends will rival you and your rig, no doubt about it.
Power Supply – 4 Pounds – $90
Powering the beast we are about to create will be a Corsair CMPSU-650TX, definitely perfect for our build. The 650watt output is great to power all of the fans for cooling, and of course all of the processing power and graphical power needed to jump ahead of the competition. Also we have all the power on one 12V rail which will keep it from ending with an early demise. With it’s nice color scheme of black and gold, it will look like it belonged inside our Thermaltake LANBOX, and have more than enough power to shred the competition.
Motherboard – 1 Pounds – $120
This motherboard is rated quite highly among the microATX form factor motherboards, and it is obvious to see why. This board takes full advantage of the new Core i7 and i5 processors from Intel, and because of that they will keep you multitasking like never before. Play multiple games at the same time if you want! Some gamers call that hotboxing, I call that purely extreme. With this motherboard you can have a maximum of 16GB of memory installed, not like that would really be necessary for our type of build, but it certainly is nice knowing you have the room to upgrade. With a whopping 10, yes TEN, USB 2.0 ports in the back of this beast, you will always have room for all of your gadgets to hook up at your LAN station. You have as many hoola-girls you want, as long as you save room for your favorite mouse and keyboard, of course!
Processor – Really Light – $195
This is probably the lightest part of our lightweight lanning beast, and also the most expensive. You might think that with a gaming computer the videocard is going to be the most expensive, but to get the most out of your computer you don’t want it to bottleneck at the processor. New games are coming out with multiprocessor capabilities, which means that it will take full advantage of your brand new processor. The Intel Core i5-750 running at 2.66Ghz is remarkable, quad core meaning you have more processing power than you can handle. You will be able to quickly switch your computers focus and of course, this is just another one of those components that will put you ahead of your friends, and probably even further ahead of your enemies.
Video Card – 2 Pounds – $135
This is the part you have been waiting for, I am sure. The BFG Tech GeForce 9800GTX+ video card is all the power you will need. Lot’s of guides will tell you to go all out and spend more money then you will need to, but this is supposed to be a lanning machine! If you need more power than this I suggest you take a step back and stay at home. This puppy will do just what you need, with high clock rates and great overall power, you need not worry about framerate lag with this bad boy. You will be able to run almost all of your games at high resolution and max your settings out. What more do you need? This will keep you up to date for quite some time, and you aren’t spending $300-$500, making upgrades possible without emptying your pockets fully.
Memory – Really Light – $105
G.SKILL has been an up and comer for quite some time now, which is great. I love seeing companies like this come up and break forward to become one of the top memory companies around. This one doesn’t change anything, with two 2GB modules, you have a total of 4gb of memory to again, keep you from bottle necking and keep your computer from running out of power. Since your motherboard has a maximum of 16GB of memory you could always buy two of these packs, netting you a total of 8GB of memory for only around $200. And I mean, with a description attention-getter like this, why wouldn’t you want this for a LAN box? Pwn the competition and frag your enemies with fast DDR3 1600 SDRAM at a price point that lets you upgrade on a budget.
Hard Drive – 1 Pound – $160
This was a really tough decision for me, not because of the part itself, but because of the cost to space available ratio. I suppose that we aren’t really trying to keep our costs extremely low in this post, but I always like to try to work on a budget. My goal for this bad boy was to stick under a grand, and so far I am pretty sure we are under that.
We have here a 150GB hard drive. Yep, only 150GB. Why so low? Because we are going for speed here. This is a 10,000RPM hard drive from Western Digital, aptly named the VelociRaptor. The 10,000RPM is 25% faster than the standard harddrive, which makes the cost of this drive go up as high as it is for the amount of space capable. This speed, for instance, will make your game load 25% faster than your friends game if he has the exact same parts besides the hard drive, and with all the parts we have picked out so far you will be guaranteed to finish first 100% percent of the time, and kick your friends butts without a doubt.
If, however, you need some more space for other things like music or videos, then you could always spend a few more dollars, for another Western Digital drive, such as the Caviar Blue, which will give you 640GB more space for only $70.
DVD Drive – 1 Pounds – $26
LITE-ON is great, and a DVD drive may seem like any other DVD drive, but sometimes you just need to know about the manufacturer before you purchase, and LITE-ON is one of those where you just know. This drive will read any disc, and play any disc, with some speed behind it. It also burns discs if you need to, but all we would really need this for is to install our games and maybe to throw in a CD once in a while. This will get the job done for only $26.
Summary – 22 Pounds – $900
Twenty-two pounds. All of this power and under than 30 pounds? I’d say that is worth it! Topping at $890, plus a hundred or so depending if you want to beef up your memory, I would say that having a 2.66Ghz Quad core with 4gigs of ram and a kickass video card to boot will teach your friends and enemies a lesson! And of course you will have a sleek and stylish case from Thermaltake to let them know that you really mean business. This installation will also be incredibly easy due to the fact that inside the case, everything is done with cages and thumb screws. You might not even need to own a screwdriver to get this one fully put together! I did not include prices for the operating system, or games, but for a good copy of Windows 7 Home Premium from NewEgg you will still barely be breaking the $1,100 mark. For this kind of cash, if you are a true gamer and your computer keeps freezing up and crashing in the midst of every important, explosive battle it’s worth it.
It’s time to upgrade folks, you gonna do it?
UPDATE: I have asked NewEgg for the opportunity to have a full build log with the above hardware. Hopefully I will be able to show you guys exactly what everything does and give you bench marks and actually weigh it when it is all put together! Just waiting for a response from them, can’t wait!
