DAN A4-SFX: The smallest gaming case in the world

Jspr said:
Don't. I've read a review from a Danish site (tweak.dk) and this is the conclusion:
"I have never seen such bad cooler like this one. I even think a standard cooler from Intel will do better, and even allow the small overclocking to 4.0 GHz. It did look promising. I think during the unpacking that it was a really nice cooler. But that it hardly can handle standard turbo frequency of my CPU is bad. The cooler is rated for a TDP of 130W, and my CPU has an TDP of 84 W. I have no idea how they got the TDP. One would almost think that there was a manufacturing defect in the surface that presses against the processor. That's the only reason I could say that would justify the poor performance."
Roughly translated :)
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Ozymandias said:
Sigh, seems like ID Cooling's products are really hit or miss. Thanks for the translation.
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I ordered anyways. User reviews on newegg are all good. So long as the heat plate is flat, I don't see how it can't cool better than the c7.

Here is a review of both the IS-40 and IS-50. http://www.eteknix.com/id-cooling-50-40-low-profile-cpu-cooler-review/6/
 
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sldr said:
Couldn't be happier with my new game-system! Thank you very very very much Dondan!

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What Dell monitor model is that? Looks nice.
 
tbooth said:
Just got my CooJag Falcon II. The copper base is attached to the heatpipes somehow (soldered?), I can't see any solder but it seems to be attached well.

The aluminum heatspreader fins are part of the aluminum base that screws to the copper. I don't have a pic but they were easy to bend back and forth and remove.

I'm planning to put this on my Asus Strix Z270i later tonight. I have a Noctua A9x14 fan ready too.


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I really hope your'e able to get this on the Z270i. Anxiously awaiting results. Temps would be good too. :)
 
CooJag Falcon II installed. I did a litte mod to force air flow through the fins. Compared to the Jonsbo with 25 mm fan I used before it is a huge difference in loudness. I bought too many cooler for this case, but now I have the matching one for me.
Some photos for those who are interested:

20170218_204827.jpg 20170218_205705.jpg 20170218_210439.jpg 20170218_222851.jpg 20170218_225012.jpg
 
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makenick said:
CooJag Falcon II installed. I did a litte mod to force air flow through the fins. Compared to the Jonsbo with 25 mm fan I used before it is a huge difference in loudness. I bought too many heatsinks for this case, but now I have the matching one for me.
Some photos for those who are interested:

View attachment 17278 View attachment 17279 View attachment 17280 View attachment 17281 View attachment 17282
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I dont see where you put your little paper fins once mounted?
 
Just got the automated email response for shipping to Australia. :)

Just have to wait for Ryzen and a decent ITX MOBO and maybe Vega..
I imagine that that AMD builds will have the same if not more problems with coolers, doubt the stock 95w cooler is going to fit.

Great to see lots of builds coming together though. :D
 
darksable said:
I don't know, what do other people think? If it's difficult to find ram without large "heatsinks" in your area, would you consider removing them or modding the tops?
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I think that would be entirely reasonable; as long as it fits the standard 30mm PCB form factor, there should be plenty of options anywhere.
 
Those getting the IS-40 should order the Ebay version and not the Newegg version. The one available on Newegg is the IS-40, which has 3 heat pipes vs the 4 heatpipes on Ebay (IS-40Pro).

I've seen a few benchmarks of the IS-40 which by itself is a tad better than the NH-9LI. I imagine the IS-40Pro will perform even better, because it has one extra heatpipe and the heatpipes are closer together on the heatsink base.

I also think replacing the fan on the IS-40 or IS-40 Pro with the Noctua A9X14 will help, since the Noctua fan pushes slightly more air at lower speeds, and is 1mm shorter.
 
I emailed ID-cooling about AM4 mounting kits for the IS-40v3 cooler. They will have them next month. Since Noctua wont supply AM4 kits for NH-L9 at least for a few months, the IS40-v3 might be an option for me :)
 
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I wonder if not having a fan directly blowing air over two of the heat pipes will decrease performance a lot?
 
tbooth said:
I got the CoolJag installed on my Asus Strix Z270i. Barely fits, but it does fit. Between the VRM heatsink, IO heatsink and Wi-Fi shroud I can just barely slide a sheet of paper through.

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What kind of g.skill ram model was that before heat sinks were removed? It looks like tridentz may JUST fit. I'm prepared to remove the heat sinks though.
 
tbooth said:
I got the CoolJag installed on my Asus Strix Z270i. Barely fits, but it does fit. Between the VRM heatsink, IO heatsink and Wi-Fi shroud I can just barely slide a sheet of paper through.

ZkBQqmi.png

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Wow I really did not expect that to fit at all. I'm very interested to hear about temperatures and whether or not TridentZ RAM w/ the headsink still on them would fit underneath.
 
Looks like you could maaaaybe slip one of those bigger 12mm fans in there. Maybe the 100mm. Not sure it would really make a difference though.

Nice job getting it in there, I was skeptical of the z270i being compatible.
 
danurv said:
I wonder if not having a fan directly blowing air over two of the heat pipes will decrease performance a lot?
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Assuming that the two heatpipes and the area blown by the 92mm is not significantly less efficient than the smaller noctua L9, there surely can only be benefit in having additional area above that of a L9, especially since the air around it is more than likely to have at least the tiniest bit of airflow.
 
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Can someone confirm that you can boot off the rear M.2 on the Asus Z270i?
 
tbooth said:
I got the CoolJag installed on my Asus Strix Z270i. Barely fits, but it does fit. Between the VRM heatsink, IO heatsink and Wi-Fi shroud I can just barely slide a sheet of paper through.

ZkBQqmi.png

xmkpMgX.png

sGNvzuv.png

oAc6yZU.png
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What did you use to remove the aluminum pin?
 
hcts said:
Thx for the kind words :)



Great ideas everyone!

DAN A4-SFX AIO build v 0.2:

So I did as suggested and flipped the PSU around. The plastic separator problem was elegantly solved by folding it together and pushing it behind the GPU :) I also redid all the cables.
Used more individually sleeved cables and rerouted more of them into the GPU and Radiator chamber. There are now slight openings the whole way trough to the other side so you can now feel a slight breeze going through the case. The 24-pin ATX connector is still the old ugly one. So here I will need to get a shorter and sleeved cable. The improved cable routing also led to a better routing of the AIO tubing with less kinks and less "bubbly" sounds afterwards :)

Regarding temperatures and sound:

I did some fast tests in Aida64 by running the stress test. Testing both CPU and GPU.

v 0.1 started throttling after around 5 min so that was the grand failure i anticipated, but these are the results from running the stresstest for around 26 min on v 0.2:

Aida64%20Test.JPG


Not that bad and there where no indications of it starting the throttle any time soon. Idle temps are around 40 degrees C.
Took one of those cheap iOS dB apps and tried to measure the sound levels which where at around 40-45 dB at a distance of about 5-10 cm away from the case. So it´s quite noisy. It´s mostly the Scythe fan and the PSU fan i combination.
I didn't hear that much of the GPU.
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Have you thought of using the Silverstone Tek TD03-SLIM ?
 
jtcera said:
Isn't 86 C a bit hot though? I'm hitting 81C while playing DOOM on a C7 with a delid 7700k. I would expect more from the delid :(. Maybe I need to reapply thermal paste on the CPU cooler side.
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No delid here, and 86°C is still 14°C lower than max... as long as it doesn't throttle, there is no issue.
 
tbooth said:
I got the CoolJag installed on my Asus Strix Z270i. Barely fits, but it does fit. Between the VRM heatsink, IO heatsink and Wi-Fi shroud I can just barely slide a sheet of paper through.
ZkBQqmi.png

xmkpMgX.png

sGNvzuv.png

oAc6yZU.png
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nice!
I would like too see some quick thermals too. I would also be really interested if it makes a difference if you run the fan in push or in pull configuration.
I personally would think in this case push should be superior but that is just an assumption.
 
jtcera said:
What kind of g.skill ram model was that before heat sinks were removed? It looks like tridentz may JUST fit. I'm prepared to remove the heat sinks though.
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These never had heatsinks, here is the link:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231964

ndjwin99 said:
What did you use to remove the aluminum pin?
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I just bent them back and forth a few times and they broke off.

Philfreeze said:
nice!
I would like too see some quick thermals too. I would also be really interested if it makes a difference if you run the fan in push or in pull configuration.
I personally would think in this case push should be superior but that is just an assumption.
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I hope to be able to do some testing tonight. I'm currently pulling air through the heatsink and blowing onto the socket.
 
Some words on the necessity of VRM heatsinks (this is Asubject where I know exactly what I am talking about since designing circuits is my job):

A typical high end Intel CPU has a rated TDP of 91W, this means under high non-synthetic loads it dissipates 91W of energy in the form of heat.
Add some power for OC and you have somewhere around 100W or so.
The processor converts electrical energy manily into heat but some energy goes into other stuff too but it really isn't a lot. So we can say the CPU needs about 110W of power from the VRM.

Now we know our output power of the VRM which is 110W.
The power is distributed evenly across the power phases. Lets take the Asus STRIX Z270I board for example, it has 8+2 power phases, 8 for Vcore and 2 for the iGPU.
This means each phase has to deliver around 14W of power (110W/8).

I assume everybody of you guys knows that much. Now lets get into buck converters.
A typical buck converter has an efficiency higher than 90% at high load currents. This means we dissipates around 1.6W in the buck converter.
The power loss in the converter is split between the high side MOSFET (30%), the low side MOSFET (50%), the inductor (10%) and the PCB traces (10%).
These percentage numbers are typical figures but they pretty accurate in most cases.

As you can see the biggest part of the power is lost in the low side MOSFET, it dissipates 0.8W.
Now we need a datasheet of a typically used MOSFET like the NTMFS4C06N used in the Asus Z170I board.
On the second page you will find a section called thermal resistance maximum ratings. In this small table there are two values we want, the second and the third one.
The second one gives us the temperature increase without heatsink (junction to ambient) per watt if the chip has a big 1sq -inch copper pad used for cooling (about 650 mm^2 or 25mm x 25mm).
The third value gives us the same information but with the minimum recommended pad size. The actual value for our board will be somewhere in between these two values, so lets take the worst case value which is 162.3 °C/W.

One simple calculation later we know that the junction temperature will be 130°C over the ambient temperatrue (162.3 °C/W *0.8W).
The maximum junction temperature of this MOSFET is 150°C (some have these high power MOSFETS have a lower maximum of 125°C).

So as we can see, assuming Asus didn't do anything to cool this poor MOSFET it won't work without heatsink, right?
Well, not really. See, thermal resistance is one of this values that isn't exact all. It is used to simplify the job of the people designing electronics (like me). The given thermal resistance is usually determined in a test with natural convection (still air) because most of the time this is the scenario it is used under.
In a computer with an air cooler you will have forced convection and with that a significantly lower thermal resistance.
This combined with the fact that Ausu DID make the cooling pads under the MOSFETs significantly bigger than the minimum recommended pad means that the MOSFETS will work just fine without any heatsink.

This is why you really don't need these big blocks of aluminium on the VRM. Without any heatsink at all the MOSFETs will probably have a junction temperature somewhere around 70-100°C (maximum) which is just fine.
If you want you can always add a small heatsink (like Asrock has) on the MOSFETS and the temperature will be even lower.

TL;DR:
The heatsinks on a VRM with more than 6 phases are in most situations just eye candy. You can remove them if you want to or replace them with a much smaller one.
 
Philfreeze said:
Some words on the necessity of VRM heatsinks (this is Asubject where I know exactly what I am talking about since designing circuits is my job):

A typical high end Intel CPU has a rated TDP of 91W, this means under high non-synthetic loads it dissipates 91W of energy in the form of heat.
Add some power for OC and you have somewhere around 100W or so.
The processor converts electrical energy manily into heat but some energy goes into other stuff too but it really isn't a lot. So we can say the CPU needs about 110W of power from the VRM.

Now we know our output power of the VRM which is 110W.
The power is distributed evenly across the power phases. Lets take the Asus STRIX Z270I board for example, it has 8+2 power phases, 8 for Vcore and 2 for the iGPU.
This means each phase has to deliver around 14W of power (110W/8).

I assume everybody of you guys knows that much. Now lets get into buck converters.
A typical buck converter has an efficiency higher than 90% at high load currents. This means we dissipates around 1.6W in the buck converter.
The power loss in the converter is split between the high side MOSFET (30%), the low side MOSFET (50%), the inductor (10%) and the PCB traces (10%).
These percentage numbers are typical figures but they pretty accurate in most cases.

As you can see the biggest part of the power is lost in the low side MOSFET, it dissipates 0.8W.
Now we need a datasheet of a typically used MOSFET like the NTMFS4C06N used in the Asus Z170I board.
On the second page you will find a section called thermal resistance maximum ratings. In this small table there are two values we want, the second and the third one.
The second one gives us the temperature increase without heatsink (junction to ambient) per watt if the chip has a big 1sq -inch copper pad used for cooling (about 650 mm^2 or 25mm x 25mm).
The third value gives us the same information but with the minimum recommended pad size. The actual value for our board will be somewhere in between these two values, so lets take the worst case value which is 162.3 °C/W.

One simple calculation later we know that the junction temperature will be 130°C over the ambient temperatrue (162.3 °C/W *0.8W).
The maximum junction temperature of this MOSFET is 150°C (some have these high power MOSFETS have a lower maximum of 125°C).

So as we can see, assuming Asus didn't do anything to cool this poor MOSFET it won't work without heatsink, right?
Well, not really. See, thermal resistance is one of this values that isn't exact all. It is used to simplify the job of the people designing electronics (like me). The given thermal resistance is usually determined in a test with natural convection (still air) because most of the time this is the scenario it is used under.
In a computer with an air cooler you will have forced convection and with that a significantly lower thermal resistance.
This combined with the fact that Ausu DID make the cooling pads under the MOSFETs significantly bigger than the minimum recommended pad means that the MOSFETS will work just fine without any heatsink.

This is why you really don't need these big blocks of aluminium on the VRM. Without any heatsink at all the MOSFETs will probably have a junction temperature somewhere around 70-100°C (maximum) which is just fine.
If you want you can always add a small heatsink (like Asrock has) on the MOSFETS and the temperature will be even lower.

TL;DR:
The heatsinks on a VRM with more than 6 phases are in most situations just eye candy. You can remove them if you want to or replace them with a much smaller one.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this detailed explanation. If I work up the courage/motivation to do this I may do so, as it would let me orient the Cooltek LP53 so that the fins were perpendicular with the RAM and the air flow would go vertical. As seated now it's just pushing air right into the IO panel and the RAM, which I am worried about. Haven't benched it yet.
 
MagicMonkey said:
Just got the automated email response for shipping to Australia. :)

Just have to wait for Ryzen and a decent ITX MOBO and maybe Vega..
I imagine that that AMD builds will have the same if not more problems with coolers, doubt the stock 95w cooler is going to fit.

Great to see lots of builds coming together though. :D
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Yup me too. Although I have my build ready to migrate from my Silverstone SG13 to the A4.

Following this thread closely to see what CPU cooler solution works as I refuse to put an ugly Noctua in this case.
 
Hi everyone, I just did a test with the C7 cooler on the AR05 heat sink:



Idle temps:

ar5 with c7 fan.JPG

Prime 95 temps:

ar5 with c7 fan stress.JPG

Idle fan speed: 980 RPM

Full fan speed: 2500 RPM

Again, i'm running a 6700k at 4.4Ghz and it hits 100°C even with the loud C7 fan on the prime 95 test, avoid the AR05 cooler if you want to overclock. It took much longer to get to 100°C than the ar05's fan though, which is something.

I also removed the heat sinks from the Tritan Z's in preparation for the nexus cooler.
 
Meccabolix said:
Hi everyone, I just did a test with the C7 cooler on the AR05 heat sink:



Idle temps:

View attachment 17368

Prime 95 temps:

View attachment 17369

Idle fan speed: 980 RPM

Full fan speed: 2500 RPM

Again, i'm running a 6700k at 4.4Ghz and it hits 100°C even with the loud C7 fan on the prime 95 test, avoid the AR05 cooler if you want to overclock. It took much longer to get to 100°C than the ar05's fan though, which is something.

I also removed the heat sinks from the Tritan Z's in preparation for the nexus cooler.
Click to expand...


Any chance you're planning to do the same thing with the noctua slim fan and C7 heatsink?
 
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