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Today starts a small series of articles about our latest project build. If you haven’t noticed, LanOC staff takes a very big interest in LAN events including hosting our own in Northwest Ohio twice a year. Anyone who has packed all of their equipment up to come out to a LAN or two will completely understand why I prefer to build a PC specifically for coming out to events. My main PC the “Fridge” is literally larger than a mini fridge. It is a complete monster and is extremely eye catching, but when it takes two people and a large vehicle to get it out to an event you really start to wish you had something smaller. This is why for the past few years I have been using my “Lunchbox” builds at any event where I just want to kick back and enjoy myself. This project build is for Lunchbox 3, over the next few days I will go over its components and then show off its performance.

See Part 2 Here - See Part 3 Here

Project Supported by: Lian Li, Asus, Kingston, Silverstone, Seagate, and Noctua

A special thank you to the companies above who helped make this project a reality!

Written by: Wes

Pictures by: Wes

Previous builds

To start things off let’s take a look at the last two events to get a feel for the previous Lunchbox builds. If you have been following LanOC Reviews over the last few years you have most likely seen these at some point. My first lunchbox was back three and a half years ago with the Shuttle SP45H7. This build (at its peak) consisted of a Shuttle SP45H7 with a Q6600 quad core CPU, 4 gigs of Mushkin DDR2, an HD4777 video card, a 2TB Western Digital Black hard drive for capacity and a 600 gig Western Digital Velociraptor for OS and Steam duty. It used the built in Shuttle cooling and power supply but the performance for the time was blazing fast, something what really surprised people at LANs considering its small size.

Lunchbox 2 is more recent and took things up a notch. I’ve wrote about this build a few times, including this May when I gave the build a refresh. Lunchbox 2’s component breakdown (at its peak).

Lian Li TU-200 Case

Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe Motherboard

8 Gigs of Kingston RAM

Seagate Momentous XT 750 Gb

Samsung 820 SSD

ST45SF-G SPU

Nvidia GTX 670 video card

Thermalright AXP-100 for CPU cooling

Lunchbox 2 is, still to this day a monster, but once I went with the SFX PSU I figured out that I could go even smaller and even upgrade a few things along the way. That is where Lunchbox 3 finally started.