Our target

As we mentioned earlier, the main purpose of this article is to explain how to assemble a compact, easy to carry but powerful rig, which is suitable for gamers as well as users who wish lots of performance in a small form factor. On the next couple of pages we will tell you why we chose which component and we will also provide a brief overview on the assembly process. Apart from that we will also be talking about the price of this rig. 

First of all we focus on the key point of this rig: the size. When it comes to making a compact and powerful system this already rules out ATX as well as the even bigger EATX motherboards, since they don't fit the type of chassis we plan on using for this rig. If you want to build something small you'd have to make you rig base on either a mATX or a miniITX motherboard. If the system has to be as small as possible you want to go for a tiny miniITX board that only measure 17 x 17 cm. Since this is going to be a powerful and also to a certain extent even flexible system regarding upgrades, we chose an mATX motherboard. What's practical with mATX motherboard is, that there are two PCI-Express x16 slots, which means that there is space for a potential second graphics card. Should you're rig be two years old and you then can't play all the recent games a high resolutions and max details settings anymore you could simply plug in a second graphics card and your system will be capable of doing a great job for at least two more years. Since we're using a mATX motherboard we're now in need of a suitable and well laid out case, which also offers good cooling capabilites but is still very compact. But right now is not yet the time to talk about the case first we'd like to let you know about our preferred choice regarding the platform we're using.

As we mentioned, we're to build a small high-end system, which is quite future-proof and therefore this system can be enjoyed for quite some time without upgrading. A great platform to build such a PC is Intels latest X99 Express chipset, which supports DDR4 memory and in combination with Intel's Core i7-5820K CPU we can even keep cost on a reasonable level. The i7-5820K is also perfect if you plan to build a mATX rig, since this CPU supports 28 PCI-Express lanes which is enough to provide to graphics cards with plenty of bandwidth. In the case of the Core i7-5930K/5960K you'd get 40 lanes but this plus a few other things make Intel charge substantially more these high-end desktop CPUs. So the i7-5820K is basically somewhere in a sweet spot regarding pricing for the kind of rig we're going to build here. In order to keep this CPU at very reasonable temperatures we're going to install an all-in-one watercooler. There is also going to be a modular power supply for perfect cable management and since we want the system to perform great we're using a pair of SSDs.