My brother wanted a pc for photoshop, studying, and some light gaming (minecraft, portal, etc.). I'm might end up throwing in an old 750 ti I have lying around. A couple months ago, I salvaged this workshop pc from certain doom, and now it has been brought back to life.

I build a lot of "sleeper" PCs, mostly because prebuilt cases are super easy to get for free, and many of them have some common traps if you want to build one yourself, so I thought I might list them off here.


- Many cases you will encounter for free come with athlon 64, pentium 4, core 2 duo, or other old platforms. These old platforms come from a time before hd audio, but the AC 97 front panel connector is the same as the hd audio connector. Make sure that the motherboard you're building with supports AC'97 audio. (asrock is good about that)
- The cases are (almost) always micro atx
- Many newer prebuilts come with io shields that are stamped out of the case, making a dremel necessary
- Stay away from sff prebuilts, especially modern ones. As you get smaller, the odds of any given system having a proprietary power supply goes up exponentially. Also, many new sff PCs come with laptop platforms.
- Dells are the most likely to be the "upside down matx" form factor with the pcie slots above the io shield, making customization impossible
- Duct tape is your friend when it comes to mounting SSDs
- Power supply length and video card size are of the utmost importance. Treat your video card choice as if it were 2008.
- You will get cut
- Prebuilts' airflow almost always amounts to a single exhaust fan in the back (usually 92mm) and negative air pressure. However, they also almost always have ventilation over where a graphics card goes, meaning you can put in GPUs, just not really hot ones.
- The cases are usually only about 1cm bigger than the width of the power supply. Keep that in mind when buying a cooler.
- Front panel connectors are often in a block for ease of manufacturing. If they aren't in the standard configuration, arduino cables work perfectly.

Thanks guys!

(I know I don't have a picture with the graphics card installed, it was a bit of an afterthought. It is just a regular reference 750 ti)