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The Core V1 is my suggestion for being the best balance of ease-of-build, accommodation of modding / extra features, size efficiency, and definitely cost. I'd use that as a mini ITX build case reference point where if you need something that it doesn't offer, you're going to be looking at some sincere compromises from what the Core V1 offers on almost any concern in a case.
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Jun 5, 2016 03:43
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Speaking of last gen card heat, I got rid of my GTX 970 (read: no discrete GPU now) in my i7-4790k based Core V1 machine and my CPU doesn't throttle anymore when I throw video to transcode in Handbrake for days on end. I'm a monster for using the stock Intel cooler on it, but I didn't really think that there was that much heat to deal with when playing games or anything else intensive. But the thing that's strange is that the GPU hardly ran when I did a lot of my CPU-intensive tasks - they were mutually exclusive I figured.
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Aug 23, 2016 03:20
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Unless you have a need for gaming or other needs requiring high end CPUs and GPUs I don't understand why home users would even need a custom build ITX. If the wife needed a desktop I'd build a NUC based PC and slap it on the back of a spare monitor or go buy some all-in-one shindig and make sure that it has an SSD in it.
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Sep 30, 2016 19:52
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:She doesn't really need the portability at all. Well, she is still kind of stuck on the idea of having a permanent set up. I am pondering if she wouldn't just be happier with a Windows tablet that she can dock.
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Oct 1, 2016 18:12
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If it transports my computer to hell and back in about 7 years, I suspect that it'll perform about as fast as a comparable market segment processor at that time that uses maybe 6x as much power.
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Nov 2, 2016 20:26
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I don't do well with just 6 bays because I'm all about RAIDZ2 with a total of 8 drives and a couple old SSDs living out their days of
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Nov 18, 2016 03:49
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I prune TV shows regularly in a cron job (really, sent to a queue for deletion) and have other needs for mass storage besides media such as some analytics projects I'm working on as well as my VMs and containers I juggle. Then there's backups / archives from things at work. Personal entertainment media is like... 40% of my disk consumption I think.
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Nov 18, 2016 06:38
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There are also optical HDMI cables going out to like 100 meters (only $280 at that length, 75 feet for $170) available via Monoprice if that's your fancy. Thunderbolt has the distinct advantage of being a single-cable solution for peripherals and A/V functions compared to HDMI or Displayport though, which is why I'm sitting on my LG34UM-95P to go with my Macbook Pro. Granted, in the future it's looking more like USB-3 and Thunderbolt 3 convergence is the steady state for single-cable stuff, but last I saw the long-distance cable options for USB-3 were really limited (primarily for looking at an external GPU). Heck, I don't know what kind of cabling standard for anything would be able to carry 40 Gbps over 200+ feet that doesn't involve an optical cable of some sort.
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Dec 10, 2016 23:04
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I'm interested in multiple m.2 slots for the sake of dual booting different OSes without having to play as much in grub or parted. I'm willing to pay money for convenience even though I'm a cheap bastard because not doing menial labor has a price for me. Oh, and from a reliability perspective dual boot drive options is handy for certain recovery scenarios. But I think in consumer sector most will use dual m.2 for RAID0 shenanigans.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:51
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I have a U-NAS NSC-800 with a really quiet 1U or very close size PSU (I don't think it's TFX) and I have more overheating issues with the CPU and motherboard than anything else due to the lack of space in the compartment. There's 2 molex connectors that match with the 8 drive bays' power connectors along with SFF connectors.
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May 16, 2017 02:18
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Paul MaudDib posted:Does it have an onboard SATA/SAS controller too perchance? In the mini ITX version (and likely in the micro ATX version of the case) there's a PCI-E extension ribbon cable that I connect my SAS card to the motherboard. M.2 drives sitting in the motherboard area may be really tough to cool properly because the tiny part of the case that even exists for the motherboard basically has no air movement through it. Mounting the motherboard to the case was really strange and I actually wound up blowing out a motherboard through shorting it on accident (real easy to do when mounting it against the case). Depending upon the motherboard you get you may be able to get a heatsink that's up to maybe 38 mm in height (the Noctua L9i was used by someone miraculously in a build I saw but he had a different motherboard that could have impacted the clearance). I've got a i3-4130 that I use as a Docker host running Ubuntu as an experiment before I migrate off of my micro ATX build that's got 10 drives in it. I'm really dreading pulling the motherboard out again to transplant my RAM over and if I had to remove it completely to install an M.2 drive under the PCB I'd possibly not even bother anymore. I'm not quite sure if I could put a Xeon D setup in here but it's the furthest I could ever expect to take this. I'm still keeping it not because I like it so much but because after searching for years for something else that's compact and can handle 8+ hard drives there's basically nothing I've found that is neither a rack mount nor would be bigger and more expensive. Anything roughly this size with an easier build would forcibly have to use 2.5" drives basically (my current path towards minimizing crap while keeping costs reasonable). If the microATX version has some more clearance it should make things a lot easier to manage. This type of case really should be a build-and-forget type of setup.
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May 17, 2017 13:29
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1.1 lbs PC, 10 lbs case. This is the fate of SFF computer owners concerned about noise.
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Jul 15, 2017 17:24
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Ok, so what’s a similar case that would accept a water cooling setup? There’s gotta be some other options besides my Core V1 to house my 1080 Ti Hybrid that doesn’t presume I’ll also be needing a huge CPU heatsink either.
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Oct 18, 2017 22:49
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Yeah, seeing my 1080 Ti emit enough heat that the system cooling capacity of my Core V1 is overwhelmed makes me think some things just aren’t possible without moving some elements outside the chassis itself. So at the moment if I want to do anything SFF with that card I’m looking for a case where I can mount my radiator outside the case itself for air rather than inside, and most cases in the market segment just aren’t going to put up with that kind of tomfoolery.
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Oct 27, 2017 20:57
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My load temps for core and VRMs are around 55C with the top of the Core V1 open. Closed, it goes up to a stupid 80c and my 4790k’s hits 65c too. These are within operating specs just fine, but with recent video cards dynamically adjusting based upon temps this is going to artificially limit performance. Ironically, if the card was fully air cooled there would be bigger fans on the card itself and wouldn’t be emitting heat out into the radiator, so I may get worse performance indirectly by having water cooling for this card just because of case logistics. Might have to give up the SFF dream and use the Enthoo Mini XL to combine my NAS and gaming desktops into one chassis because it’s annoying packing and unloading 2 important machines every time I move 
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Oct 27, 2017 22:06
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I got a 1080 Ti hybrid because I didn't see any end to the cryptocurrency mining boom back in September, and while I was kinda hating myself for buying a $800 graphics card (why bother with a $500 1070 when the Ti was now so close in price?). And now, I'm just shaking my head at how much worse it got but glad I wasn't wrong either.
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Feb 7, 2018 15:00
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Wait, is there any CPU option pricier than an 8700k that doesn’t have the heat spreader problem? For $40 to send it off I could just buy a higher end CPU that doesn’t have this problem I would hope? Or are people doing this precisely because there’s no option besides going another $100+ or something?
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Apr 6, 2018 00:28
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I started on a mini ITX build a while ago and have abandoned it, so now I've got myself a Phanteks Shift X case that has no guts for me to fill it with. It's a real nice case and while rather large for a mini ITX case, I'm not about to sit around looking at a case that has nothing in it. Willing to let it go for $50 + shipping which makes it roughly 50% of the original pricing including shipping I think.
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Oct 25, 2018 19:30
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It’s too bad that I’ll just go with an external GPU anyway because a 1080 Ti Hybrid will not fit in that case without some serious surgery. Also, I highly doubt that Keras and Tensorflow will be ported reliably and quickly enough for me at that point to care. As such, such a NUC model really is only of interest for me in a pure gaming system and generally the same GPUs that are tops for machine learning are also top performers for games anyway.
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Dec 21, 2018 13:26
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Xeon D series CPUs (and accompanying motherboards) are available in mini ITX. The thing to watch for is that the latest Xeon D series (D-2100 and such) are rather expensive and really not suitable for most home users, especially given the price range on them.
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Dec 22, 2018 19:12
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I see a lot of SFF builders using blower based GPU coolers while using an AIO for the CPU. Given that GPUs are a much bigger power consumer than a CPU in a gaming machine why don't more people have hybrid coolers for their GPUs and use a fairly lower profile HSF for the CPU? I ask partly because I think almost every SFF case I've seen like the Louqe Ghost and the NCase M1 were designed where there's no space for the pipes near the GPU and it's basically impossible to buy a smaller end SFF case because of the tubes coming off the GPU. I'm mostly annoyed trying to fit all my crap into a smaller case but it seems inevitable that I'm going to be back in a larger case with sound dampening material and accepting that a HSF that weighs 1 kg is the better all-around option.
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May 25, 2019 03:06
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You have regrets? I bought an i7 NUC and got an eGPU setup that didn't have a high enough wattage rating to run my 1080 Ti normally while I waited for the new Ryzens and Turing GPUs. At least the NUCs are useful as Kubernetes nodes in the future though but boy is it lame having to downclock my GPU every time I want to play anything framerate unlocked or train a non-trivial net via Tensorflow.
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May 28, 2019 01:55
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big crush on Chad OMG posted:What’s the point of a NUC with an external GPU setup?
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May 28, 2019 13:47
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I have an i7 NUC with a 1080 Ti in an eGPU and it does just fine for me at 1440P at 21:9 over 100 FPS in Warframe at max details.
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Jul 26, 2019 01:23
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The CPU cooler height is troublesome if you want something on the heavyweight side for CPUs and mounting an external radiator seems like a fool’s errand with that case. But maybe it’s worth trying. At a certain point a NUC is a better idea than an SFF system and what I wound up with for over a year until I put my full size 3900X system together.
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Oct 25, 2019 13:33
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The case seems like Fractal Design's experiment in "what happens when we let the aesthetics and design people have full control?" It's probably the most beautiful SFF case probably ever, honestly.
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Mar 19, 2020 22:55
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An AIO for SFF to me is better suited for GPUs rather than a CPU unless you're running primarily CPU-bounded tasks like non-GPU accelerated video encoders all dang day. GPU power usage has climbed dramatically for the mid and upper end while for consumer CPUs it's mostly held steady or dropped within their respective user tiers.
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Oct 23, 2020 16:54
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The Louqe Raw S1 seems interesting although expensive at $300. Seems a lot like the Evolv Shift series. I hated working in that case though and the Raw S1 seems to address one of the common issues with ITX cases. Might be a good compromise for folks that want that Corsair One look. https://www.louqe.com/raw-s1/ https://sffgeek.com/2021/02/21/louqe-shows-off-its-upcoming-raw-s1-sff-pc-case/
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Apr 4, 2021 18:58
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If looks and cuteness are a priority by all means build whatever makes you feel happy but from a utility perspective unless you’re trying to do some low to medium power embedded applications an rPi won’t be that great compared to a Shield and there will be some edge cases that it fails (HEVC is one for me). And I think there’s a way to have Remote Desktop setup on the Shield as well so a decent wired network connection should be sufficient for that use case. There’s probably mods for Shield TVs that can make them look pretty as well so it’s not mutually exclusive to have an rPi for modding purposes. Heck, I had an rPi for a while but I went with running everything in containers on my server in the end that is more inline with what I do professionally anyway.
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Jun 12, 2021 14:55
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Meshlicious seems to be another option if you want to emphasize cooling for a system and stay under the NR200 in size. There really is no way around compatibility v. size trade-offs frankly, it's kind of the reason Apple has its whole separate hardware ecosystem with SoCs they own up and down the chain. Even if you design a case custom, it will wind up entirely based around the cooling setup for a GPU (more commonly the hotter, higher power consumption part in prosumer type PCs these days) unless you pull off something similar to what Apple did with its trashcan Mac Pros that it abandoned years ago. And lastly, there's always pre-built options like the Corsair One series but that only gets down to 12L in volume as well which is probably near the physical limit to support high end parts while keeping a PSU also in the enclosure (most builds in like nano ITX setups rely upon external PSUs which kind of cheats in a sense).
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Dec 20, 2021 15:34
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teagone posted:It's so true. I've built exclusively in ITX cases for my own PCs for the last several years now. It's unfortunate, because ITX commands such a large premium over normie hardware lol.
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Jun 3, 2022 00:14
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Butterfly Valley posted:*looks nr200ishly at you*
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Jun 5, 2022 23:50
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It’s more a sort of go small or go home point rather than pragmatism-above-all that standard mid towers overall fits. On a cost efficiency basis ITX is overall worse unless power is super expensive in which case I hope you’re looking at more power efficient components rather than thinking about form factor. I’ve had several mini ITX cases before and it’s not like they take less space than a NUC or a random 15” laptop either. Clearly there’s other constraints beyond size if one is thinking about ITX at all and IMO part of the appeal of ITX is about packing as much power into as small of a space as reasonable with vaguely off the shelf components.
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Jun 6, 2022 12:17
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Interesting, a competitor to the Corsair SFFs from… Gigabyte? https://www.notebookcheck.net/Gigab...0.626753.0.html
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Jun 10, 2022 05:18
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The central cooling unit looks cheaper than Corsair’s but is probably like 5% different in cooling efficiency. Gigabyte is fairly reasonable and I’d expect pricing a bit under what Corsair’s equivalent model would be.
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Jun 11, 2022 01:24
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4K video can be done just fine on old-rear end hardware if it's encoded with MPEG2, lol. The issue is really about the profile and the encoding. 4K AV1 at highest profile settings will murder my 3900X even to decode it and it absolutely will choke most Macs because Apple isn't supporting AV1 in their hardware possibly ever (which is a bit troublesome given AV1 is nice and open source and such so in theory it should be easier to get cheap hardware out the door soon, so buying expensive hardware that doesn't really "do" common commodity codec acceleration is a weird possibility to me).
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Jun 21, 2022 16:55
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GPUs will need to get their power draw under control or high-end SFF machines will have to move toward GaN based PSUs as a rule if we're to avoid moving the PSU outside the chassis. I think I just saw an SFX PSU featuring GaN. I'd rather not hop onto those immediately but 2nd and 3rd generation SFX GaN PSUs seem like a good time to jump in.
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Jun 22, 2022 20:10
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Gallium Nitride. See https://wccftech.com/the-worlds-smallest-fanless-atx-psu-pictured-meet-the-hdplex-250w-with-gallium-nitride-technology/ for what can happen to PSUs thanks to the FETs getting substantially smaller / more efficient
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Jun 22, 2022 20:46
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Most mITX boards that have a free PCI-e x16 slot and can support 12+ SATA / SAS drives tend to be boards meant for business (Intel Xeon D series comes to mind) rather than gaming. The bigger issue is likely that you'll need a case that can fit all that stuff and that leaves mostly mATX cases such as the Node 804. The big worry is really thermals for the likely thirst GPU and space for a reasonable cooler for the CPU. In an enterprise setting you're probably rackmounting it all and shoving jet fans at 10k+ RPM with something like an SSL accelerator or a data plane card for maybe 100 GbE in the PCI-e x16 slot.
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Oct 4, 2022 19:44
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I'd buy it for living room use except my cats love to claw and chew on mesh and foam type materials so it'd be on the floor in about a day, tops. I don't have speaker grilles and have to protect the isolating foam for my speakers because of these gremlins and I have to be careful about the speakers bought still because without a grill the exposed cone can't be one of the paper cone types either because one cat has a thing against cardboard and paper and destroys it upon realizing it's a wood pulp product.
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Nov 18, 2022 16:42
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