"Project Kitty" AKA blatant and shameless copyright infringment. A Simple PC build for the GF. Somewhere between the painfully slow loading times and intermittent BSODs I figured it was probably time for her to give up the rapidly ageing laptop in favour of something that would be able to effortlessly handle all the graphics and design applications she uses. I also figured I should make sure it had a bit of extra graphics capability for gaming since she loves tf2, l4d2, bioshaq, magika, borderlands etc. Code: Product Quantity Price ---------------------------------------------------------- 240GB Corsair Force Series 3 SSD 2. 1 £99.98 2GB Asus GT 640, 28nm, 1782MHz GDDR 1 £67.97 80mm Fractal Design 1400rpm Case Fa 1 £5.15 8GB Corsair DDR3 Vengeance Low Prof 1 £62.16 MSI B85M-E33, Intel B85, S 1150, DD 1 £41.82 650W Corsair RM Series CP-9020054-U 1 £84.78 Intel Core i3 4130, S 1150, Haswell 1 £79.36 Samsung SH-118BB/BEBE Black 18x SAT 1 £10.90 ---------------------------------------------------------- Net Total £449.12 (inc VAT) So on with the build: Components as they arrived, always exciting. Everything plugged into the case All done!
j/k there's more She really likes the "Hello Kitty" brand. At this stage the PC was built and finished, booting and happy. But it was just a black and gray slightly dirty box. I figured since she's never had a desktop before I should try and make it a bit more aesthetic than sticking a big ugly lump on the desk. Obvious solution was to decorate the case with some Hello Kitty™. So I set about making some stencils. Stencils all printed out and ready to be cut Cutting out was a slow process, especially with my complete lack of artistic ability. The mask was adhered to the side panel with a small amount of spray adhesive. The case was black so I designed the mask so that I could spray once with white to make a white face plus a small white border around the logo. In this photo you can see that everything covered in the white mask will remain black, and all the black metal you can see will be painted white. During the spraying I realised I hadn't used enough spray mount (spray adhesive) - when the mask got wet from the paint it changed shape and pulled away slightly from the surface. This was a bit of shame because it resulted in quite a lot of overspray, but the end result was still ok. I was getting a bit sloppy on photo taking and I forgot to take a photo of the result of the first mask. This is the second mask, used for painting the bow. This time I stuck it down with more spray mount and got a much better result. Here's the logo once the paint was dried. Peeling off a mask is amazingly satisfying. It's like peeling the protective cover off a new phone screen, but better After I put the case back together I realised the white and pink kitty didn't really fit in well with the gray front face on the PC. Since I had loads of left over pink spray paint I figured I could spray the gray trim with the same paint as the bow for a more consistent theme. No photos of pulling apart or painting - with one exception all the peices just snapped together, with careful prying I could seperate everything _except_ the fan grill from the gray front panel. After that I masked the fan grill and spraying it was fairly trivial. So satisfying... Drive bay covers back on This is the front panel cover, it slides up to reveal the front panel USB ports, audio jacks, power button, power and HDD activity LEDs. The power LED shines through the front panel power button _and_ the cover's power button (parts of it are transparent). Similarly the HDD led shines through both. So I very carefully masked off those places to make sure the LEDs could still be seen. Results were surprisingly good! Finished! I was really happy with how it came out, extremely glad I decided last minute to respray the trim. The machine boots into win7 in 11 seconds, ran tf2 at ~160fps with high fps configs and ran NS2 and ~70fps on medium quality. Only scare was when I couldn't get the ethernet adapter to work and realised it was because I was being a moron and trying to install the win8 drivers by mistake This is the last photo I took, just a few seconds before my camera ran out of battery. She liked it so much she cried but I was unable to capture the joy on film
