Need for Speed...Computing Speed ;)

Being the computer nerd that I am, one of the first things that I had to think of when going abroad was having the right computer. Up until last spring semester, I used a laptop for all my day to day tasks. Although, when my friend gave me an astonishing deal on an 8 core Xeon desktop that all changed. A majority of the research at school that I perform involves computationally intensive tasks and I use a large computing cluster through my university, After getting my 8 core Xeon and upgrading it with the latest GTX 1070 that all changed, I could now run all the necessary computation for my research. Now back on point, after having the benefit of  an amazing computer that could do all that for so long, I knew I wanted to try to replicate something although for my international trip. Initially, I thought of getting something like a Microsoft Surface 4 or a computer with an external GPU slot. Though, all these options were going to be 1K plus. Therefore, I began my hunt to build my own PC, small enough to fit in a suitcase and cheap. Solving the first problem of size wasn't hard, I just looked for a mini ITX motherboard(6.7 x 6.7 inch). After that, I got a simple and cheap AMD processor( 7870K with integrated R7 graphics). All that was left was a power supply, I found the Silver Stone compact form factor power supply. A majority of the other PC parts, I was going to just steal from my tower. Hence, I was able to create my whole PC with under $290!

Building the PC
Building a PC for me is like second nature after helping many friends pick out parts and repairing older PCs. Hence, first I took out the motherboard opened the CPU slot and slid in the CPU. After, I attached the fan to the CPU and loaded down the two support fan holders and wired the fan jumper cable to the motherboard. Next, I stole two 4 GB ram sticks from my tower and installed them in the RAM slots. Then, I attached the 24 pin motherboard power cable along with the CPU direct power to the motherboard. Last, I wired up an old mechanical hard drive to the power supply and a SATA cable bridging the motherboard and hard drive.

Booting
All while that wiring was happening, I created a live bootable copy of Windows 10 on an external hard drive. So, after that completed and the wiring was complete I placed that hard drive into the motherboard's USB port. Now, since this build was an open air/cheap build I didn't invest in a power button for the PC. So, for first boot to occur I had to use a jumper cable to connect two pins on the motherboard together, simulating the operation of a switch. After that, the PC began to boot up onto the external hard drive and the windows installation window showed up! At this point, I let the installation run and downloaded all my necessary apps/updates. Finally, to test the real performance of the PC I installed my GTX 1070 into it and it ran like butter after that. Hence, with the limited resource of a motherboard, processor and power supply I was able to create a small travel size computational intensive computer!

 Spec on PCs
     Current Tower
      CPU: Intel Xeon E5 2648L, Sandy Bridge, LGA 2011, 1.8GHz 8 cores
      GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 Super Clocked ACX 3.0
      Motherboard: MSI x79A-GD45(8D) (MS-7760) ATX
      RAM: 12 GB DDR3 RAM  (Used to have 20GB)
     Power Supply: Thermaltake TR2 600W
     After Market CPU Cooler: Antec 650 Liquid Cooling System
     Primary Drive: Seagate 600 Pro 240GB SSD
     Secondary Drive: 1 TB WD Black 7200RPM Mechanical Drive

   International Rig (Weight including all cables and parts 6.5lbs)
   CPU: AMD A10 7870K 3.9GHz 4 Core FM2+ Black Edition
   GPU: Integrated Radeon R7 Graphics/ PCI E GPU GTX 1070 from current tower
   Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN FM2+ Mini-ITX
   RAM: 8GB DDR3 RAM
   Power Supply: Silver Stone SFX SX500-LG
   Hard Drive: Samsung 120GB SSD 840 Evo Series
   Cooler: Included CPU cooler in package
 
  Laptop Mac Book Pro Mid-2010 15" 



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