A Look At My New SFF Work PC :)

By NextGen_Gamer
in Hardware Hangout

 Share

Recommended Posts

Veteran

NextGen_Gamer

Posted
Posted

I've been at my current job for almost one year now and have been quickly regarded as the "tech guy" (no doubt a lot of you know how all about that). Even though I was provided with a pretty nice Dell OptiPlex for my office, I decided I needed something a little more worthy of being my work computer. After all, I technically spend more time on my work PC than I do on my personal machine at home (a now aging 2009 MacBook Pro - don't worry, that will be upgraded soon enough ;) So, here is what I just got done building over the weekend:

Lian Li PC-Q12A Mini-ITX All-Aluminum Case (with 300-Watt FSP Group Micro-ATX PSU)

ASUS P8H77-I Mini-ITX Motherboard (Intel H77 Express Chipset)

Intel Core i7 3770S Processor (3.10GHz, "Ivy Bridge," 65-Watt TDP)

8GB (4GB x 2) DDR3-1600 Crucial Ballistix Tactical Memory

128GB OCZ Vertex 4 Solid State Drive

Noctua NF-R8-1800 80x80x25mm Case Fan

Total Price ~$850 (doesn't include the cost of Win7 Pro since I already had a spare copy)

Before I get into the performance, I gotta say a few words about the Lian Li case. I have come into contact with Lian Li before, but this is the first time I have owned one myself. In a word, it is pure perfection. Lian Li cases have a such an absolutely beautiful quality to them that it is impossible to describe in words. You have to see and feel one in person to truly appreciate it. At $155 for this particular case, Lian Li is obviously not cheap, but once you have one unboxed in your home you will realize that it is worth every last penny. For those that have the money, I cannot recommend Lian Li enough.

So, how fast is it? Ridicuously fast. I really wish I had recorded the entire Win7 install process to show you guys. From the moment I first pressed the power button to typing in my account name and password, the entire process took just 4 minutes and 33 seconds!!! The Lian Li case has no optical drive bay, so I installed Win7 from a Patriot Supersonic USB 3.0 drive. Between that, the Vertex 4, and the "Ivy Bridge" processor I feel like this must be close to the limit of how fast you can install Windows 7. Boot-up performance is equally impressive. Windows 7 starts up in roughly 20 seconds. I actually posted a YouTube video showing me doing a shutdown/restart (see video here). I also installed PCMark 7 and got a score of 5643 PCMarks.

All-in-all, I am very pleased with the build. It is dead silent with the side panels on, very fast, and gorgeous to look at. If anyone here was looking at building a computer that includes any of the parts listed above, I highly recommend all of them. If anyone has any questions about the build or parts in it, feel free to ask me. And finally, if anyone has any benchmark requests, please let me know - I love testing out computer performance :)

Here are a few pics of the build:

post-58800-0-33989900-1338160917_thumb.j

post-58800-0-60350200-1338160740_thumb.j

post-58800-0-81574700-1338160737_thumb.j

post-58800-0-78384800-1338160743_thumb.j

post-58800-0-09425800-1338160876_thumb.j

Link to comment
https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1080079-a-look-at-my-new-sff-work-pc/
Share on other sites
Mentor

Odom Member

Posted
  • Member
Posted

They let you build your own PC and use it at work? That would be cool, I'd replace mine immediately as well :)

I'm curious, how is IT Support provided, if anyone can bring in their own machine and nothing is standard anymore? Do they do it on a best effort basis and the rest is up to the user?

Veteran

NextGen_Gamer

Posted
  • Author
Posted

I'd turn on nogui boot in msconfig to see if that makes it a shade faster (almost no point but it could a fraction of a difference)

Also, nice monitor :shifty:

haha - It's my old Samsung 19" LCD from 2004. I use it when building new PCs/working on other people's computers. Back then, it was a top-of-the-line LCD and cost $399. Nowadays, 24" LED LCDs cost like $200 lol

They let you build your own PC and use it at work? That would be cool, I'd replace mine immediately as well :)

I'm curious, how is IT Support provided, if anyone can bring in their own machine and nothing is standard anymore? Do they do it on a best effort basis and the rest is up to the user?

Wow, very nice setup!

My office PC has remained the same IBM Thinkcentre system since starting at the company over 5 years ago!

Just out of curiosity, what line of work are you in, and do your daily tasks require such a powerful system?

I'm assuming the guy is providing his own support ;). And if he's regarded as the tech guy, I doubt anyone else will be building their own haha

I'm in the oil/gas leasing business. There isn't necessarily a need for all this power - I kinda just wanted to have the fastest computer in the office. However, all this speed does come in handy once you start doing some serious multi-tasking. We use FileMaker Pro for our lease database along with a huge array of Excel spreadsheets. Once you get FileMaker Pro open, a couple 1000+ line Excel spreadsheets, multiple IE/Chrome tabs, some Word docs, etc., you'll understand why the SSD and Core i7 were important for me to have. Even under those circumstances, everything operates buttery smooth, whereas before on the Pentium Dual-Core Dell machine I had it would start to choke-up. Could I have gotten by with less? Of course. But when you have the means to go all-out, why not do it?

Although my primary job there is data entry/lease analysis, I am also trying to fill the role of computer support guy along with server maintenance. So although it's okay for me to have my own PC, the rest of the employees will have to make-do with their Dell boxes ;)

  • 6 months later...
This topic is now closed to further replies.
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Posts

    • The Trump administration doesn't want you to use OpenAI's GPT-5.6 without its approval

      By ad47uk · Posted

      Those people that come over here on boats are already in a safe country, if they want to come over here then do so correctly though the right channels. I was born in the U.K, my family that came over here came so via the proper means. My partner came here via the correct channels, she also became a British citizen, she knows more about this country than most of them that was born here, including myself, she worked hard to do what she does. She will stick up for this country and have done a few times, when people from her own part of world have put the U.K down. We are not going to agree, all I said to start with is that maybe Trump has the right idea with this America first thing and maybe we should start doing the same. Maybe not as drastic as what he is doing, but we do need to sort this country out, we need to sort out tech instead of relying on the U.S and others. Again you have not shown why you are so annoyed that we have left the E.U and this is what it is all about? If you don't live in the U.K and live in the E.U are you annoyed that we left your little club? If you live in the U.K and is pro-E.U, then fair enough then I can see how it annoys you. Are you one of these people who lives in the U.K and have a holiday chalet in the E.U and can now only stay there for so long? If so, then that is bad luck. As I have posted before, I have no problem with people coming here to work, as long as they do if via the proper channels. We are out of the E.U, people voted out, and maybe if more people had voted instead of sitting on their backsides the results would have been different. But they like the E.U and our government thought no we would not vote to leave. How wrong they were, surprised me. I expected to wake up in the morning and hear on the radio that we voted to stay. As I said, we are out and have been for 10 years, we are not going to go back in anytime soon if we ever do, so we all need to make the best of how things are. Anyway, this is supposed to be a tech site.
    • Why it's almost impossible to produce a smartphone in the United States

      By JohnnyQ55 · Posted

      Tim Cook: "The US over time began to stop having as many vocational kinds of skills." What's the point of wasting time getting those skills if you can't get a job with them? Good Lord, maybe he and his cohort of CEO's who exported all these jobs to China should just shut the f**k up :D
    • The official Funny Pictures thread

      By Steven P. · Posted

    • Game I've been Working On

      By +pmrd · Posted

      I made a new Cinematic/Trailer for the game, this will be the intro, still a work in progress!  I also updated the Steam page with a ton of new screenshots! 👀 https://store.steampowered.com/app/3925340/Incoherence_Dark_Rooms/  
    • Microsoft Opens Fairwater: Wisconsin AI Campus Runs as One Supercomputer via 800G Ethernet

      By +TRS-80 · Posted

      Closed-loop cooling and a custom 800G network protocol let the $7.3B campus run as one AI training machine. Microsoft confirmed June 23, 2026, that its Fairwater campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, is fully operational — and the engineering behind it makes the facility something fundamentally different from every data center that came before it. Where conventional cloud infrastructure racks up general-purpose servers and parcels out workloads to each one independently, Fairwater links hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 Blackwell GPUs into a single, coherent cluster using a two-story building design, 800-gigabit-per-second Ethernet fabric, and a proprietary networking protocol co-developed with OpenAI and NVIDIA. The result, according to Microsoft, is the closest thing to a purpose-built AI supercomputer that any company has ever placed in commercial operation. https://www.techtimes.com/articles/319205/20260627/microsoft-opens-fairwater-wisconsin-ai-campus-runs-one-supercomputer-via-800g-ethernet.htm  

  • Recent Achievements

    • Conversation Starter
      jessse3334 earned a badge
      Conversation Starter
    • Reacting Well
      JuvenileDelinquent earned a badge
      Reacting Well
    • One Month Later
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      One Month Later
    • Week One Done
      Excellence2025 earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Week One Done
      flexorcist earned a badge
      Week One Done

  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      501
    2. 2
      +Edouard
      211
    3. 3
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      150
    4. 4
      Steven P.
      73
    5. 5
      macoman
      62
    Show More

  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!