Using pieces from upgrades and from good deals, I put together a new “portable computing platform” machine.
It started with an employee discount on the Core i7. It gained momentum after the 12GB to 24GB upgrade of the 920 left me with 12GB of fast RAM. The last pieces were the case (with a handle), motherboard, ssd, wifi card and keyboard
As usual, prices include taxes and shipping, and reflect discounts. All product links are from the actual vendor, except for CPU [which was a direct Intel purchase.]
Summary of discounts:
CPU: 50%. OS: 10%. Wifi: 15%. Keyboard: 10%. BD Player: $20 in free blanks.
| Item | Product | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i7 2600k 3.4GHz LGA 1155 95W 2011/Oct/25 |
$175 |
| RAM | Corsair XMS3 12GB (6x2GB) DDR3 1600 PC3-12800 Triple Channel TR3X6G1600C9 – 4 sticks, 8GB total | (reuse) $0 |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z68-M Pro LGA 1155 Micro ATX | $125 |
| Power Supply | APEVIA WIN-500PS | – |
| Video | Motherboard, Intel | – |
| Case | APEVIA X-QPACK2-NW-BK/500 Aluminum Micro ATX w/ 500W PSU | $100 |
| SS Drive | Crucial M4 64GB SATA 6.0Gb/s 2.5″ MLC Marvell controller CT064M4SSD2 | $95 |
| HD Drive | none | – |
| BD/DVD/CD | Samsung Blueray Player DVD burner 12x BD-ROM 16x DVD-ROM 48x CD-ROM SATA | $55 |
| Keyboard | Logitech K400 RF keyboard and trackpad | $36 |
| Wireless | Rosewill RNX-N300 Wireless N 802.11b/g/n | $17 |
| OS | Windows 7 Professional SP1 64-bit OEM | $126 |
| Total | – | $729 |
Later, this machine did get a dedicated video card: the GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 660Ti 2GB GDDR5 PCI-Express 3.0.