Pay It Forward and Ryze(n)
Glytchtech
I’ve talked about the general idea of Pay It Forward builds, and what they mean to me. Today I want to talk specifics. This is a build that I did for a community member earlier this year. My criteria for choosing recipients changes, but one thread is constant — Potential.
“How will this hardware enable them to grow”
It could be helping them into education or work, maybe to help someone replace old or dying hardware, or just to game on better hardware (I’m a firm proponent of learning through play). In this case, it was a question of a Maker held back by their tools. Anyone who’s used CAD knows how resource-heavy it can get, and Glytch was doing design work on a FX6100 with 8gb ram and a 750ti. Not an ideal setup, but he was persevering and coming out with some amazing projects. One of his designs was recently a finalist in the 2017 Hackaday Prize. I saw the potential for so much more, and decided to do something to help. Didn’t think of it at the time, but over time he’s become one of my closest friends.
I’d just recently received several Ryzen processors from AMD as part of my advocacy efforts during the launches, and decided to make the Ryzen 5 1600X the heart of the build. Now before I go further, there was some unique considerations for this build. It had to be powerful, it had to be capable for multi-tasking, and did I say it also had to be small? See, Glytch lives in a RV. Not much space for full-towers in there, and when you consider all the other tools/tech that space gets even smaller. There’s a battery bank, as it’s wired up to solar panels. There’s several 3d printers, soldering stations, and several monitors above the desk. So, the build had to be m-itx.
At the time, the only board on the market was the Biostar X370GTN so I was daily checking Newegg for new stock. Then, I needed a GPU to pair it with. I reached out to AMD and they found a perfect pairing for this CPU, an ASUS RX480 Strix 8GB. Finished up with 16GB of Corsair LPX, a 240GB NVME drive, and a 1TB 7200rpm storage drive.
Now we game together several times a week, and we’ve started some interesting projects together. All goes to show that community outreach can produce results far exceeding your initial goals.
What’s that? You noticed there wasn’t a case mentioned? Well, yes but partly because Glytch is toying with the idea of 3d printing his own case. Will have worklog of this as/when it happens.
As always, if anyone has parts sitting unused and unloved, or would like to collaborate on future Pay It Forward builds; get in touch through either the Mail or Social icons on this publication.
Signing off for now, Destiny 2 just finished downloading..
Joe
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