Put Together a Party PC
LENGTH OF TIME: 1-2 HOURS
LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY: MEDIUM
THE CONCEPT
DO YOU MISS LAN PARTIES? We do. The steady erosion of split-screen multiplayer and improvements to online play mean that the tradition of gathering at your best friend’s house, setting up bulky CRT monitors, and connecting cables all over the place so that you could all play Quake II together is a distant memory.
Well, the LAN party isn’t dead just yet—at least, not if we’ve got anything to say about it. We’ve got a challenge for you: Grab a few friends and a few drinks, and set up as many systems as you can in one room for a proper old-fashioned game night. So, this month, we’re gonna be building a compact PC designed to be taken over to a friend’s place for a spot of co-op (or competitive) gaming.
This gave us a few preordained necessities to work around. An ITX form factor motherboard was basically mandatory, squeezed inside a small case. However, we also needed a decent graphics solution; integrated graphics on an APU simply wouldn’t cut it here, so a discrete GPU was needed. Alongside all this, we
