Sorry this is going to be a longish blogpost but I thought someone would like a build that's not for gaming or video editing:
My wife was in desperate need of an upgrade to her Macbook C2D 2007. We made the decision to go with a custom built desktop to keep costs down but losing portability :( (I secretly wanted her to get a Macbook Air)
Parts list from my local computer shop (Memory Express):
- GA-H81M-HD3
- i5 4440 - integrated video (Intel HD 4600)
- 8GB Kingston memory
- 120GB Sandisk SSD
- 1TB Seagate drive
- Bitfenix Prodigy
- Corsair 430W Power Supply
- Recycled parts: 500MB WD Green drive, monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, Windows 7
The store installs the CPU and memory onto the motherboard for free to make sure it works. Building is so easy these days. Total cost was around $630.
Gigabyte has a lot of budget boards with the H81 chipset. It took me some time to figure out what the differences were: the cheaper boards don't have DVI but only D-Sub or HDMI. The HD3 has all three so that what I went with to go with her Samsung monitor.
The Bitfenix Prodigy was, honestly, a bit of a disappointment. It's way larger than I thought and I also had problems mounting the 3.5 drives. The screw holes are too large -- more more likely: I don't know what I'm doing. The Mac Pro like handles are really weak and bend when you use them - I don't suggest using them. The plus side is that it's really nice looking and there's a lot of air flow.
I did the standard Unibeast/Multibeast install and needed only a couple of bootflags (I'll update this when I get home). Mac App store and Facetime work. I couldn't get the iWorks free-hack to work though.
My wife is an accountant and heads up her own insurance business so her computing needs are a bit out of the ordinary for the Mac world. She needs to use Quickbooks for Windows (the Mac version is not quite the same) and a terrible insurance software which is Windows only (it's looks like it's just a website wrapped into a Windows application so there's really no reason why it's not crossplatform). These obviously have to be run either in "Bootcamp" or a VM. For her convenience I set up Virtualbox - which means you have to enable VD-T in bios and therefore need the"dart=0" bootflag. I considered Parallels because I really like the features (asking if usb drives should be used in the VM or OSX) but I don't like it's yearly update$. Virtualbox seems to be fast enough so far and it's free. USB drives mount ok. Shared folders with OSX do not seem to work (files get corrupted).
I was also scared about the Intel graphics being cruddy but surprisingly it's not that bad. Minecraft runs quite smoothly :/ I'd say it's a bit better that a budget Nvidia card (620) but probably not as good as 640?
I set up the drives like this:
- boot, apps, VM: 120GB SSD
- iPhoto/iTunes libraries, other files: 500MB HDD
- Time Machine: 1GB HDD (yeah this shouldn't be inside the case but it's better than nothing)
All in all this is a really well performing budget build.
Here are the Multibeast settings and Virtualbox settings: http://imgur.com/a/KtBce
submitted by mtx
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