Core i7 Micro Build: LAN Party Machine

I remember the days when I didn't think twice about lugging monstrous full tower cases and heavy monitors to LAN parties. I actually had a monitor that weighed 70 lbs—literally. It was a 21” Sony CPD E540 or something like that. Sure, it was heavy; but it also had a 1600 x 1200 resolution and I could generally see distant enemies much better than my friends, thus giving me an advantage with a sniper rifle.

My full-size tower probably wasn't much lighter, either. At least it could keep my hardware cool, right?

OK, OK, I admit—I was young and I may have been trying to compensate for something... Well, no matter how much fun I had having a slight upper hand over my buddies, they always got the last laugh when they were watching me painfully lug my gear up some basement stairs and trying to fit it into my car at 4:00 in the morning. It's a wonder I didn't give myself a hernia.

Thankfully for people like me, companies today offer LAN party goers and space-conscious people an array of good hardware that aims at packing features and performance into a small size. I recently set out to build such a LAN party machine to see if I could pack typical desktop performance into a portable package. Read on to see how I did.