The Situation

At the end of my high school career I was gifted an Alienware R2 as a graduation present. Compared to my prior computers the GTX 965M GPU paired with a 6th generation i7 processor, and a series of heat syncs that could handle 100% usage for hours on end felt like all I could ever ask for in a do-it-all machine. For the first three years of college it served me well as a portable computer that could easily handle development and most entertainment. However, by my third year of college I began to dream about the possibilities of more powerful machines. Not only was the idea of having a dedicated desktop workstation truly exciting, but as laptop designs had evolved over the last few years it was now possible to fit development worthy components in a thinner and lighter frame than ever before that could put the Alienware (at a hefty almost 5 pounds) to shame. I realized I could buy a machine with comparable specs that could handle all of my mobile computing needs (classes, library studying, etc.) at half the weight, to be paired with a desktop workstation that could handle the tasks a laptop just wasn’t cut out for.

Acquiring Parts

I was in luck when looking for parts to build my new desktop. I had been searching for affordable ways to put together a decent machine for a few months when a friend offered to give me some of the parts she had used to build her machine back in 2011. The catch was that the motherboard in that system had encountered cooling issues in the past and as a result had melted parts of the CPU power connector and further damaged board connections. This meant I was now in the market for an Asus Rampage IV X79 to replace the old board. Thanks to eBay I was not only able to find a replacement board, but also one that included an EKWB water block to properly cool the VRM. I also purchased EKWB matte black tubing, water-cooling pump, and reservoir. Apart from the board and water-cooling the remainder of the housing, air-cooling, and memory was in excellent shape including three Noctua fans, three NF-F12 fans, a Lian-Li PC-O8 case, 64 GB of Trident Z DDR3 2400 MHz RAM, a i7 3930k Sandy Bridge-E architecture CPU, and a GTX 1060 6GB GPU (however, I traded out the 1060 for an AMD Vega 56 to support MacOS dualboot with Windows).

Building Process

Once all of the components had been collected from the old machine or otherwise purchased, I got to work cleaning the case and beginning the build process. The soft matte black tubing ended up being an excellent choice as it was both malleable and easier to attach to the water block nozzles than hard plastic tubing. Apart from a small leak the first time the water-cooling system was tested (caused by a loose compression fitting on the pump) the system encountered no physical or power issues after completion.

The Result

The two computer solution has worked wonders so far. With the desktop’s CPU overclocked to 4.6 GHz I can easily run games on graphical settings I couldn’t have even come close to on the old R2. I’ve chosen the Dell XPS15-9550 as my mobile laptop, and at about a pound lighter (and half the thickness) it’s easy, and convenient to carry, as well as powerful enough to handle any reasonable workload. After the switch, my only regret is not putting in the time, effort and money to improve my quality of life sooner.