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Take That, iMac?: Build Your Own All-In-One PC
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1. Build Your Own All-In-One

I still remember starting college back in 1998. The dorms were packed with smug social science students who showed up with iMac G3s. Meanwhile, all of my engineering buddies were rocking PCs, most of which we had built.

The relationship between Macs and PCs is much different today. If you find yourself attracted to the iMac aesthetic, but would rather save enough money for your first quarter’s books (and get your hands dirty with something new), follow along as we build an all-in-one system based on Intel’s Thin Mini-ITX standard from the ground up.

We’re starting with Loop’s LP-2150 chassis, available on Amazon for somewhere between $250 and $300 (ours was $264.60). Not only does this enclosure house all of our hardware, but it also features a 21.5” screen with a maximum resolution of 1920x1080.

2. I/O: Some Advantages, Some Disadvantages

The Loop enclosure’s integrated I/O isn’t as diverse as Apple’s. You don’t get FireWire 800 or Thunderbolt support. Rather, it includes two USB 2.0 ports, audio I/O, and a MMC/SD card reader. However, because the motherboard we’re using adheres to the Thin Mini-ITX standard, Loop is able to expose its back panel, facilitating extras like eSATA and USB 3.0. You don't get those connectors on an iMac. When it comes to supporting practical devices, the advantage goes to our PC, we think.

3. Making Important Connections

If you’ve built PCs in the past, piecing together an all-in-one won’t be difficult at all. Really, the most foreign step is connecting the enclosure’s display. Loop’s chassis employs an LVDS connector, which consists of a thin cable covered in shielding material that has to be clipped onto a compatible motherboard’s LVDS output.

Naturally, that means it’s important to pick the right board—one designed with integration in mind, rather than external connectivity. Also, because we’re dealing with a very space-constrained form factor, dimensions are critical.

We’re using Intel’s DH61AG, a Thin Mini-ITX platform with LVDS and Embedded DisplayPort (eDP) outputs. A Z-height of less than 20 mm ensures that the platform isn’t too “tall” to fit within the vertical limitations of our enclosure. But by no means does Intel have the market cornered on Thin Mini-ITX motherboards. Check out the company’s component catalog for a more complete list of boards from Gigabyte, ECS, Wibtek, and MiTac.

4. Picking A Compatible Processor

Less space for hardware means less space for cooling, too. The DH61AG supports Intel’s Core i7, i5, and i3 CPUs with 65 W TDPs and lower.

Because this board centers on the H61 chipset, it was originally designed with Sandy Bridge-based CPUs in mind. We started with the Core i7-2600S that you see installed, but then updated the board’s firmware to support Ivy Bridge-based chips. A Core i7-3770S initially seemed like it’d work out really well. However, random hangs at boot and failures to complete Windows Update compelled us to swap the newer chip out in favor of a Core i5-2400S, which worked flawlessly.

We’d probably stay away from third-gen Core processors until the DH61AG’s BIOS is better-sorted. For now, we’re happy with the Core i5, which allows us to make a pretty direct price comparison to Apple’s base-level iMac.

5. A Special Heat Sink From Intel

Naturally, the boxed cooler that comes with Intel’s Core i5-2400S won’t fit in an all-in-one—it’s too tall. So, we had to buy an Intel HTS1155LP standalone heat sink and fan combination, which extends cooling out horizontally, rather than putting a fan on top of an array of aluminum fins. The $21 expense is a small price to pay for what we’re trying to do.

6. Active Cooling Dissipates 65 W

A fan bundled with the HTS1155LP mounts directly to the chassis, blowing through the heat pipes and densely-packed fins, yielding effective active cooling more akin to something you’d see on a laptop. It's able to handle up to 65 W processors.

7. Dual-Channel DDR3-1333

Next up: memory. We’re using a pair of 4 GB DDR3-1333 modules from Crucial. However, for the purposes of pricing, we’re comparing twin 2 GB modules instead, again, matching Apple’s entry-level configuration.

Instead of using standard DDR3 memory slots, the DH61AG exposes twin SO-DIMM slots mounted horizontally. The overarching emphasis is still Z-height, and two 204-pin SO-DIMM connectors sitting on top of each other consume very little space at all.

8. Inexpensive 802.11b/g/Draft-N Wireless

The Intel WiFi Link 1000 half-length mini-PCI Express card is pretty much baseline for wireless networking. It still supports 802.11b/g/Draft-N connectivity on the 2.4 GHz spectrum, though. We were able to find it for about $12 bucks on Amazon.

Intel’s DH61AG features one half-length mini-PCIe slot and one full-length interface, both of which we populate during the process of our build.

9. Installing The WiFi Link 1000

Installing Intel’s WiFi Link 1000 is a simple matter of inserting the card at a 45-degree angle and pushing down, securing it by tightening bundled screws down into the two posts.

Although the WiFi Link 1000 has receptacles for two antennas, Loop’s chassis only has a single antenna lead. For a $12 wireless adapter, that was completely fine. If you need greater network performance, there’s always the motherboard’s integrated gigabit Ethernet controller, too.

10. 80 GB SSD, Right On Your Motherboard

An 80 GB SSD 310 gives us lots of on-board solid-state capacity. We’re not factoring the mini-PCI Express card into our judgment against Apple’s iMac, though, because the little card costs $175 on Newegg. That’s more than $2/GB, and we know we can find significantly better deals on 2.5” SSDs, if we really want to go that route.

Nevertheless, for folks who want to combine solid-state and magnetic storage in the same space-constrained machine, the SSD 310 is a pretty cool option. Its performance specifications aren’t particularly impressive, given its SATA 3Gb/s controller. However, the responsiveness of flash-based storage is nothing short of amazing compared to a conventional hard drive. You could add this little card to your all-in-one PC and still spend less than you would on an iMac with no SSD.

11. Installing Intel's SSD 310

It’s just as easy to install the SSD 310. Pop it in at a 45-degree angle, push down, and fasten two included screws to the on-board posts. If you want to install Windows to the 80 GB repository, simply tell the DH61AG’s firmware to boot from it before whatever other storage you deploy in the 2.5” drive bay.

12. More Solid-State Storage

Even with an 80 GB SSD populating our motherboard’s mSATA slot, more NAND-based storage couldn’t hurt, right?

We’re using a 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Black drive spinning at 7200 RPM for our iMac price comparison. But we’d much rather be launching apps from a 300 GB SSD 320. So, that’s what we installed in the one spot available for 2.5” drives.

13. Installing Intel's 300 GB SSD 320

Screwed into a caddy and secured, the 300 GB SSD 320 ensures we have plenty of space for Windows and anything else we might want to install.

14. An 8x DVD Writer From Sony

An 8x DVD+/-RW drive from Sony is both fast enough and functional enough to keep us happy. It’d be nice to have Blu-ray read capabilities as well, but that’d nearly double the price of our selection.

Of course, if you want to spend some of what you’d save on an iMac, splurging on a Blu-ray combo drive for less than $60 isn’t an entirely bad idea.

15. A Precise Fit Is The Key To A Pro Finish

Slid into place and secured by an included bracket, Sony's optical drive integrates cleanly with the rest of our all-in-one.

Truly, one of the most important factors in our decision to present this little project is an end result that we’d be happy to have on our desk at work or school.  A neatly tucked-away DVD burner helps keep the system’s lines clean as you look at it head-on.

16. Familiar Bits And Pieces, Just Smaller

The completely built-up platform consists of copious memory, an 80 GB mSATA SSD 310, a mini-PCI Express wireless card, and a Sandy Bridge-based processor—in our case, a Core i5-2400S, after all of our testing was said and done.

17. Closing Up

Closing the chassis back up is as easy as it was to open. There are five screws holding the plastic back onto the body. Simply mate the two sides together, make sure everything snaps into place firmly, and re-attach the screws.

First, though, be sure to connect the power lead for the fan attached to the plastic lid. There’s an open header on the motherboard you can use.

18. An I/O-Rich Back Panel

Here’s what the bottom of chassis looks like closed up, and with the Intel DH61AG motherboard installed. In addition to the two USB 2.0 ports on the side of enclosure, the platform itself exposes an additional two USB 2.0 ports, a pair of USB 3.0 ports, 1/8” audio connectors, gigabit Ethernet, HDMI, eSATA, and DVI display output.

The left-most connector is for power. Without room for an internal power supply, you’re forced to lean on an external brick. Fortunately, cooperation between Intel and its Thin Mini-ITX ecosystem partners means that all-in-ones and their building blocks are being designed with the same power sources, thermal ceilings, and cooling solutions in mind. You shouldn't find Thin Mini-ITX motherboards without that vital connector. Otherwise, you'd have no way to get this thing up and running.

19. Securing The Stand

Mounting the Loop enclosure’s stand is a simple matter of sliding four large cut-outs over similarly-sized screw heads and sliding the stand down.

20. One Last Step...

From there, thread in a fifth and final screw to lock the stand into place. It tilts up and down, but doesn’t swivel side to side (it doesn’t adjust vertically, either). So, you’ll need to arrange the all-in-one facing right at you and tilt into the best possible viewing position.

21. Taking Pride In A Sharp-Looking Build

I’m not going to sit here and try to claim that these first-gen Thin Mini-ITX-based all-in-ones are as polished as iMacs. Their cameras are inferior, they don’t include AMD’s mobile graphics processors (and are consequently unsuitable for gaming), and their speakers are pretty weak. Moreover, the fact that Apple supports its entire platform is a boon to folks unwilling to crack their systems open and troubleshoot hardware.

However, our alternative isn't at all bad. Nothing about it feels cheap or hacked together. And we have a lot more flexibility over what goes into it than Apple offers. Processing, memory, storage, and networking are all fairly tunable to suit your budget or performance desires. Access to a more potent GPU would be the one thing we wish we could change.

22. Ready For Desktop Productivity

The tradeoff, of course, is that the Mac natively runs OS X, while the PC is Windows-based.

How much does doing this all yourself save? Well, if you use the Loop chassis, the Core i5-2400S, 4 GB of DDR3-1333, Intel’s DH61AG motherboard, a low-profile cooler, an 8x DVD writer, the WiFi Link 1000 card, a 500 GB Western Digital Scorpio Black hard drive, and Logitech’s MK250 wireless keyboard and mouse kit, then you’re spending around $780. The cheapest iMac costs $1200, or $420 more.

Use some of that savings to grab a small mSATA-based SSD, an operating system, a slim Blu-ray drive, or just pocket the difference.

Intel tells us the Thin Mini-ITX form factor will continue evolving. Particularly in the face of Windows 8, touch-based screens, WiDi, 7-series chipsets, and more comprehensive support for the Ivy Bridge architecture (and its improved graphics engine) should augment the integration of all-in-ones even more.