Many students who have just finished their college entrance examination have messaged me asking for recommendations for gaming laptops as they are about to enter university life. However, as a recent university graduate, I believe that while gaming laptops are convenient, trust me, most people just leave them on their dorm desks to play games and rarely move them, only taking them home during holidays.
So this time, I recommend a more powerful mini gaming host, which is more valuable than so-called gaming laptops, has stronger performance, and also offers some portability. The only downside is that you need to prepare a monitor yourself. However, nowadays, a monitor costing around 1000 yuan can easily outperform a gaming laptop screen under 8000 yuan.
The processor is an i5 8400, 6 cores and 6 threads, with a base frequency of 2.8 GHz, which can boost to 3.8 GHz during regular use, outperforming the throttled i5 8300H.
The motherboard is MSI’s B360m. Due to the small case, I bought a relatively small motherboard, which is not an ITX motherboard but a regular small board that fits the case size perfectly.
The graphics card can only be a single fan version, and the best one is the EVGA brand with the model GTX1066, a dessert-level gaming graphics card that supports most games at high quality, and the cooling of the graphics card is definitely better than that of a gaming laptop.
The memory is a Crucial DDR4 2400 8G, and the storage is a HP M.2 regular SSD 120G for the operating system, along with a mechanical Seagate 1T.
The power supply is a Patriot 500W Gold certified for gaming, and the cooling uses a downward-type cooler from Deepcool, which is flat. The assembly took 2 hours, and due to the small case, cable management was a bit challenging and required some attention.
The case is Jonsbo C2, with the power switch on the side, all metal body, silver brushed panel, very compact and exquisite. The internal space is limited, so I will share a detailed assembly video later. If you want to assemble a PC like this, you must pay attention to the size of the computer components to ensure they fit the case.
This super mini gaming computer is now assembled. I personally think it looks very nice, simple yet not basic, with top-notch performance components inside. This performance can already surpass gaming laptops under 8000 yuan, and the total cost of building this computer is only over 5000 yuan, with better cooling than gaming laptops.
For students about to enter university, I highly recommend assembling such a mini gaming host and buying a monitor. Playing games in the dormitory is very comfortable, and after four years of use, the computer’s performance will still be strong, definitely attracting the envy of other students.