Maybe a little bit of nostalgia for some of the SFF community! I bought this Node 304 to build an office PC for my dad back in 2013. It had an AMD A10-5800K APU underneath a trusty Hyper 212 EVO and 16GB of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR3 with no discrete GPU, and it lasted for around 9-10 years before the PSU(probably) died and it was decommissioned into storage.
My dad had the idea of refurbishing it and giving it to my nephews as their first PC, and today I proudly presented them with this system, built on a budget using a mix of new and used parts, in a case that is older than both of those kids.
It has the following:
Ryzen 7 5800X3D Thermalright Phantom Spirit SE 32GB Vengeance DDR4 3200 Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB B550I Aorus Pro AX Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500GB Corsair AX760 PSU with custom cables
It is paired with a 1080p 180Hz monitor, and the primary use of this system will most likely be a mix of Fortnite and Minecraft. I didn’t have time to run a bunch of benchmarks, but Fortnite was buttery smooth and the ray tracing in Minecraft blew their little minds.
I re-drilled the holes for the PSU bracket to give the GPU(or PSU cables) another 10mm of breathing room. Luckily the GPU I ended up going with is small enough for that to not be an issue, but this still gives them more flexibility to upgrade in the future. The Thermalright CPU cooler ended up being a pleasant surprise for $37, and on this motherboard it places the fan about 4-5mm from the rear fan grille, which is perfect for preventing the fan from getting noisy due to the grille but still allowing it to draw most of its air from outside the case.
I think it actually turned out pretty good for being a bit of a parts-bin special. I just wish I had a cool uncle when I was 10 years old to build me something like this. Kids these days!
