A Quick Note

This is literally just an article on the building of the computer. There’s nothing really special here, it’s a computer; however, it’s still part of the process. There also may be some of you who are interested in what I used. I’ll also cover some things that I put into consideration while building the computer for the arcade cabinet.

The Components

I focused on a few things here when choosing my components, the number of USB ports and expandability available, the latest components available (I purposefully waited for Alder Lake processors to be released), and limits frills such as LED lighting as the computer will be inside of a cabinet.

Here are all of the items that I purchased for the computer.

I wanted the Alder Lake processor as it packs a lot of newer technologies in the new chipset. Additionally, it is the first major change in Intel’s LGA desktop CPU socket size since the introduction of the LGA 775 in 2004. I bought the Intel Core i7-12700K, this Core i7 12th gen 12-Core 3.6 GHz processor supports PCIe 5.0, DDR5 memory, and integrated Thunderbolt 4 and WiFi 6E support.

I chose the ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard mostly due to brand, but also it’s immense support for USB ports! This bad boy sports all of the newer tech, so it should give me a bit of growing power for a little bit, PCIe 5.0, DDR5, 2.5Gb LAN, Bluetooth V5.2, and five M.2/NVMe SSD slots. Then for the USB capabilities, this thing has a whopping EIGHT USB type-A ports and THREE USB Type-C, two of which are Thunderbolt 4 capable! If that weren’t enough, this board has expansion capabilities for me to add another nine more USB ports, giving me TWENTY in total!

• 2 x Thunderbolt™ 4 ports (2 x USB Type-C^®)
• 7 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (6 x Type-A + 1 x USB Type-C^®)
• 2 x USB 2.0 ports (2 x Type-A)
• 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 headers that support an additional 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports
• 2 x USB 2.0 headers that support an additional 4 USB 2.0 ports, and lastly
• 1 x USB 3.2 Gen 2×2 connector for one more USB Type-C port

So, I sure hope that I don’t run out of ports, because I definitely plan to use them!

Next, with the exception of the storage devices, I stuck to the Corsair brand and purchased the H100i Elite Capellix CPU cooler, a RM850x modular power supply, an extra LL120 fan for the back of the computer, Vengeance 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5 5600 memory, and finally this beautiful case.

Lastly, the storage, I mixed SSD with HDD. The reason being that SSD is great to run the OS on as it provides great speed and dependability; however, I’m going to have A LOT of games on this thing, and while I could go and spend a good chunk of cash on an 8TB SSD, I could throw down half that amount of money on an 18TB HDD. So that’s what I did, I purchased the Seagate Firecuda 520 1TB solid state drive and the Seagate 18TB Exos hard drive.

Building of the Computer – Unboxing and Assembly

How about some unboxing and assembly pictures of the thing?

Time to clean up this cable mess!

Let’s turn this sucker on!

And…

Now that the computer is built, my next task is to transfer, and continue working on, all of the work that I did back on my laptop building the Arcade Software.

Graphics Card

Updating this post to bring up an important thing that I skipped over, the graphics card. At the time of building this, I chose against purchasing a graphics card mainly for financial reasons. I’m building a computer that will be running old games, games that won’t require a lot of horse power like the ones available today require. Therefore, using built-in graphics processor should be sufficient until, at a later date, I decide purchase a card and upgrade the machine.