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

My cooljag didn't fit my socket 1151. It only has mounts for 775 and 1366. Hm. I'd definitely have to remove my tridentz RAM heat sinks. Wow, even then it'd be tight.

I continued with 5 minute OPEN AIR (Dan case has not yet arrived) Prime 95 test with C7 stock and L9i+25mm fan on a delidded 7700k at stock clocks. If you're interested... Noctua paste was used. Inside the delid, coollabratory liquid metal was used. Applied very meticulously.


L9i 25mm noctua A9 PWM (5 min Prime 95)

upload_2017-2-22_1-27-18.png




C7 stock (5 min Prime 95)

upload_2017-2-22_1-27-52.png


Screenshots were taken exactly at 5 mins. I let it run a few mins longer on each but temps stayed at 85C max. I can easily add the 14mm stock l9i fan in for a test but I'm done for the night. At this point, I have so many coolers... as long as it doesn't thermal throttle while gaming, I don't care anymore. I'll probably just leave the l9i in there stock. The delid seems key to keep the 7700k under 90C on these small coolers. My advice is to delid, buy the highly available l9i, and forget about it. Enjoy the build.
 
jtcera said:
My cooljag didn't fit my socket 1151. It only has mounts for 775 and 1366. Hm. I'd definitely have to remove my tridentz RAM heat sinks. Wow, even then it'd be tight.

I continued with 5 minute OPEN AIR (Dan case has not yet arrived) Prime 95 test with C7 stock and L9i+25mm fan on a delidded 7700k at stock clocks. If you're interested... Noctua paste was used. Inside the delid, coollabratory liquid metal was used. Applied very meticulously.


L9i 25mm noctua A9 PWM (5 min Prime 95)

View attachment 17568



C7 stock (5 min Prime 95)

View attachment 17569

Screenshots were taken exactly at 5 mins. I let it run a few mins longer on each but temps stayed at 85C max. I can easily add the 14mm stock l9i fan in for a test but I'm done for the night. At this point, I have so many coolers... as long as it doesn't thermal throttle while gaming, I don't care anymore. I'll probably just leave the l9i in there stock. The delid seems key to keep the 7700k under 90C on these small coolers. My advice is to delid, buy the highly available l9i, and forget about it. Enjoy the build.
Click to expand...

Where did you order your CoolJag?
 
Meccabolix said:
sure, is it ok if i leave it on the motherboard though? i've used loads of thermal paste recently lol
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yes, of course. I am just interested in detail shots, how near it is to the motherboard components. Was orienting the heatsink with the bend pipes pointing to the RAM an option?
 
jtcera said:
and I already bent the fins off so it's going to be a lost cause unless they sell 1151 brackets for it.
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The manual that comes with it says that it only supports 775 and 1366 but there is an 115x bracket in the box. It has 3 holes in it. I thought the same thing when I got mine. Double check your accessories.
 
Hello from Austria to all of you following this thread.

While I'm following HOCP privately for ages, it was your inquiries to Noctua that brought up the idea to register and engage in this thread on behalf of Noctua.
I'm working at Noctua as a product engineer, which means I have had many prototypes going through my hands over time.
Of course not all of them make it to a retail product, as we only want to introduce new products when there is a noticeable improvement to previous products, be it performance wise, handling wise or compatibility wise.

Coming to this specific thread, I want to clear a few things up:
- I know that one of my colleagues said the fan clips don't fit, which seems to proven wrong by photos here. This statement was not given deliberately to get rid of the inquiries, we just don't have first hand experience with this combination and we are always very cautious to give compatibility advise for things we haven't tested. My colleague also said that he must have missed the photos, as he saw them when he went over the thread again.

- We are not angry that people are asking for the fan clips. However, as someone has already pointed out, it's not the material cost for the clips which make this difficult for us, it's the handling and shipping costs.
We appreciate that you are purchasing our fan for this interesting case but everything considered we are on par in the best case or maybe even make a loss on each fan sold, if we send out fan clips to every single user.
While we are open to projects and we have a bit of room for supporting them, I can't justify something like this to my boss if it goes beyond a few fans, especially if there are alternate ways to install the fan - sorry.

However, this doesn't mean that we haven't thought about a way to come towards you.
I suppose that most users in this thread are from the US and Canada? If you could find someone who would be able and willing to distribute the fan clips to the users interested in them, I could imagine sending a bag with fan clips to this person. Or maybe Dan himself would be interested and capable of making things work?
We are open to suggestions how we could handle this, preferably in this thread.

- Regarding the comment of a bigger L9i where another colleague of mine was quoted, well, he started at Noctua only a few months ago and thus isn't that much in the know regarding things that have already been tried in the past.
While his answer wasn't wrong, a slightly taller L9i specifically tailored for this case is unfortunately unrealistic. We've tried a taller L9i in the past but performance wasn't noticeably better, which is the reason why the L9x65 looks quite a bit different than the L9i/a coolers.

- From my own experience with delidding, starting with Ivy and Haswell, this is crucial for getting somewhat acceptable temperatures with small coolers. Unfortunately we can't officially encourage customers to delid their CPU though ...
Using TDP limits with K-CPUs, which are usually disabled by default on Z boards, can help a bit as well, as it won't allow the CPU to go beyond this with some special loads like Prime.
For this purpose the AVX-Offset function of the new Skylake processors is also quite helpful.
 
Noctua said:
Hello from Austria to all of you following this thread.

While I'm following HOCP privately for ages, it was your inquiries to Noctua that brought up the idea to register and engage in this thread on behalf of Noctua.
I'm working at Noctua as a product engineer, which means I have had many prototypes going through my hands over time.
Of course not all of them make it to a retail product, as we only want to introduce new products when there is a noticeable improvement to previous products, be it performance wise, handling wise or compatibility wise.


- Regarding the comment of a bigger L9i where another colleague of mine was quoted, well, he started at Noctua only a few months ago and thus isn't that much in the know regarding things that have already been tried in the past.
While his answer wasn't wrong, a slightly taller L9i specifically tailored for this case is unfortunately unrealistic. We've tried a taller L9i in the past but performance wasn't noticeably better, which is the reason why the L9x65 looks quite a bit different than the L9i/a coolers.

- From my own experience with delidding, starting with Ivy and Haswell, this is crucial for getting somewhat acceptable temperatures with small coolers. Unfortunately we can't officially encourage customers to delid their CPU though ...
Using TDP limits with K-CPUs, which are usually disabled by default on Z boards, can help a bit as well, as it won't allow the CPU to go beyond this with some special loads like Prime.
For this purpose the AVX-Offset function of the new Skylake processors is also quite helpful.
Click to expand...


Hey there. :)

I'm not going to worry about the fan clips - that's an issue that I'm not as invested in, as I'm happy to make my own.

1) I think you'd be amazed at how many of us who've backed the Dan A4 and the Sentry are in Europe or Russia. I certainly was.

2) The taller L9i not actually performing that much better is kind of fascinating, actually, however that wouldn't be the ideal cooler anyways, because having a fan directly next to the case panels sounds, well... kind of like a jet engine.

3) As a corollary to the above, what would you guys think about, rather than creating a taller L9i, creating a shorter NH-L12?

As I mentioned in my email to you guys, I'm actually using an NH-L12 in my small form factor case right now, after having removed both fans and jury-rigged the 120mm fan to be underneath the heatsink. If you want pictures of how this works, I'd be willing to take them for you. If the NH-L12 were shortened by 18mm, that height could mostly come from the heatpipes - at which point, a slim 120mm fan could be placed underneath the fins.

I'm sure there are some significant technical challenges to that, but I'd love to know what you guys think.

Thanks for opening a line of communication, and cheers for all the hard work.
 
Noctua said:
I suppose that most users in this thread are from the US and Canada? If you could find someone who would be able and willing to distribute the fan clips to the users interested in them, I could imagine sending a bag with fan clips to this person. Or maybe Dan himself would be interested and capable of making things work?
We are open to suggestions how we could handle this, preferably in this thread.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the statement, I guess you can add Europe and Russia to the list of users.
I suggest you package the clips and sell it to the public, like what scythe, Prolimatech, ID-Cooling and Thermalright do (check the attached photo)
Or simply bundled it with the A9x14 !, we need the clips in our mod projects like the (Thermolab LP53 + A9x14) or the (Dynatron t318 + A9x14)
I'm sure Noctua will make a good profit out of this clip either way (even if it is bundled)
41Pavs9exSL._SX355_.jpg efb78e17-9aba-428b-8a80-428611558a35.jpg Fan-Clips-Package_01.jpg IMG_7583.JPG IMG_7584.JPG IMG_7585.JPG
 
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kingtron said:
Thanks for the statement, I guess you can add Europe and Russia to the list of users.
I suggest you package the clips and sell it to the public, like what scythe, Prolimatech, ID-Cooling and Thermalright do (check the attached photo)
Or simply bundled it with the A9x14 !, we need the clips in our mod projects like the (Thermolab LP53 + A9x14) or the (Dynatron t318 + A9x14)
I'm sure Noctua will make a good profit out of this clip either way (even if it is bundled)
View attachment 17581 View attachment 17582 View attachment 17583 View attachment 17584 View attachment 17585 View attachment 17586
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Yep! It would just make it all way easier and better looking than some homemade screws/rubber bands/strips--mount. Either way, I'm also located in Europe (Denmark)!
 
krcm0209 said:
What's that about?
Click to expand...
I was talking about Self Clearance of packages being imported from other countries.

DHL and any other courier company takes this opportunity to add extra fees on top of the standard import Tax+Duty. Courier companies justify this by claiming they ave some sort of involvement in the clearance of the package. Some of them say its a brokerage fee, others say its a payment forwarding fee when customs asks for payment. Long story short you save yourself $20-$50 depending on your countries currency by advising the Courier you're going to self clear the package, go down to the airport, pick up the documents then go to the customs office yourself to clear it. This way the only charges you pay is Tax+Duty.
 
kingtron said:
Thanks for the statement, I guess you can add Europe and Russia to the list of users.
I suggest you package the clips and sell it to the public, like what scythe, Prolimatech, ID-Cooling and Thermalright do (check the attached photo)
Or simply bundled it with the A9x14 !, we need the clips in our mod projects like the (Thermolab LP53 + A9x14) or the (Dynatron t318 + A9x14)
I'm sure Noctua will make a good profit out of this clip either way (even if it is bundled)
View attachment 17581 View attachment 17582 View attachment 17583 View attachment 17584 View attachment 17585 View attachment 17586
Click to expand...

Temps on this Cooler have been nice to see
 
Noctua said:
- Regarding the comment of a bigger L9i (...)
Click to expand...

Everyone is talking about the L9i here, but with Ryzen available for pre-order as of today, would you have any updates regarding an AM4 mounting kit for the L9a? Would love to use that one for a mid-range build. Latest official statement I read was "We are currently exploring the available options and will provide more information at a later date." Cheers!
 
Horrocko said:
Everyone is talking about the L9i here, but with Ryzen available for pre-order as of today, would you have any updates regarding an AM4 mounting kit for the L9a? Would love to use that one for a mid-range build. Latest official statement I read was "We are currently exploring the available options and will provide more information at a later date." Cheers!
Click to expand...

I have an l9a and I looked in to it. The brackets won't be available till late 3Q or 4Q of the year.
 
Anyone looking for TY-100 fans can get them directly from ThermalRight or, as previously posted, from nansgaminggear.net.

I contacted both via email and was quoted:

$10 shipped internationally direct from ThermalRight (I assume from Taiwan to the US)
or
$6.99 plus shipping from nansgaminggear.net
 
tbooth said:
The manual that comes with it says that it only supports 775 and 1366 but there is an 115x bracket in the box. It has 3 holes in it. I thought the same thing when I got mine. Double check your accessories.
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I double checked and all I received in the box is what's pictured here. Can you please elaborate on the 1151 bracket?

upload_2017-2-22_13-15-7.png
 
jtcera said:
I double checked and all I received in the box is what's pictured here. Can you please elaborate on the 1151 bracket?

View attachment 17596
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I ordered from frozencpu as well. I had two baggies with brackets in mine and one of them had 1151 brackets inside.

Initially, when I thought I didn't have them I contacted [email protected] and they offered to send the brackets to me. So give that a shot.
 
AMD RYZEN RELEASE

Hey guys, you might want to hold off from buying new Kaby Lake CPUs. Looks like Intel just got suckerpunched.

Even the lowest on their release line, Ryzen 7 1700, is 46 % faster than i7 7700K at only 65 W for only $329. Just wow. I wasn't expecting that.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3171...ntels-core-i7-at-a-fraction-of-the-price.html

Also at 65 W you wouldn't need to worry about cooling at all, L9i or AR05 should be more than enough. (7700K is at 91 W)


EDIT: their top of the line 1800X and 1700X are at 95W and faster than i7-6900K at 140W :) Personally I think that there is really no point in getting better than 1700 if you buy it only for gaming :) Also cooling might be a problem in the Dan case, I would like to see the results.
 
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promaty said:
AMD RYZEN RELEASE

Hey guys, you might want to hold off from buying new Kaby Lake CPUs. Looks like Intel just got suckerpunched.

Even the lowest on their release line, Ryzen 7 1700, is 46 % faster than i7 7700K at only 65 W for only $329. Just wow. I wasn't expecting that.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3171...ntels-core-i7-at-a-fraction-of-the-price.html

Also at 65 W you wouldn't need to worry about cooling at all, L9i or AR05 should be more than enough. (7700K is at 91 W)


EDIT: their top of the line 1800X and 1700X are at 95W and faster than i7-6900K at 140W :) Personally I think that there is really no point in getting better than 1700 if you buy it only for gaming :) Also cooling might be a problem in the Dan case, I would like to see the results.
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ive understood that ryzen is soldered and shouldnt have any need for deliding...im really hoping this is true and keeping my eyes on 1700. would be just too great to have cooler cpu with more oomph.
 
promaty said:
Also at 65 W you wouldn't need to worry about cooling at all, L9i or AR05 should be more than enough.
Click to expand...

If you manage to install an L9i or L9a on an AM4 socket, let me know how...
Really looking forward to Ryzen myself, just don't have enough info on MB/cooler support yet for a use case as specific as this case. Also, keep in mind that AMD only showed heavily multi-threaded applications at their event... not quite a real-life scenario for gaming yet (unless you are streaming a lot), if that's what you are looking for.

Still, reason to be optimistic!
 
lordzahl said:
yes, of course. I am just interested in detail shots, how near it is to the motherboard components. Was orienting the heatsink with the bend pipes pointing to the RAM an option?
Click to expand...

Here are the pics you wanted:

I am using the Gigabyte z170n gaming 5 ITX motherboard.

first are some pics of the modded AXP-100H muscle, i removed the little thin stand with a dremel tool, then put the fan underneath and cable tied it to the heat sink with cable ties:

DSC09321.jpg DSC09324.jpg DSC09322.jpg DSC09323.jpg

I had to remove the VRM heatsink, otherwise the fan wouldn't fit in with this orientation, if you rotate it however, it will fit, but it wont cool as well as this orientation.

I left the heatpipe as its connected to the northbridge heatsink, and it doesnt look like i can take it off that one:

DSC09309.jpg

Showing how close the fan is to the other components. one side is touching the RAM modules and the other side is sitting on the heatpipe:

DSC09312.jpg

This is the mount attached to the motherboard:

DSC09325.jpg

I can't fit the cooler in horizontally as the wifi module is in the way.

Also i cant fit the front panel usb 3.0 header cable into the socket as the cooler is in the way but i have purchased a low profile extention from Moddiy:

https://www.moddiy.com/products/USB-3.0-20%2dPin-Internal-Header-MF-Extension-Cable-(Low-Profile-Connector).html

I hope this helps.
 
Meccabolix said:
Here are the pics you wanted:

I am using the Gigabyte z170n gaming 5 ITX motherboard.

first are some pics of the modded AXP-100H muscle, i removed the little thin stand with a dremel tool, then put the fan underneath and cable tied it to the heat sink with cable ties:

View attachment 17603 View attachment 17604 View attachment 17605 View attachment 17606

I had to remove the VRM heatsink, otherwise the fan wouldn't fit in with this orientation, if you rotate it however, it will fit, but it wont cool as well as this orientation.

I left the heatpipe as its connected to the northbridge heatsink, and it doesnt look like i can take it off that one:

View attachment 17601

Showing how close the fan is to the other components. one side is touching the RAM modules and the other side is sitting on the heatpipe:

View attachment 17602

This is the mount attached to the motherboard:

View attachment 17607

I can't fit the cooler in horizontally as the wifi module is in the way.

Also i cant fit the front panel usb 3.0 header cable into the socket as the cooler is in the way but i have purchased a low profile extention from Moddiy:

https://www.moddiy.com/products/USB-3.0-20%2dPin-Internal-Header-MF-Extension-Cable-(Low-Profile-Connector).html

I hope this helps.
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That is a thing of beauty!
 
promaty said:
Ryzen 7 1700, is 46 % faster than i7 7700K
Click to expand...

unfortunately you and many others have fallen for AMD's very basic marketing trick of holding a party with only the benchmarks that favor them. nobody plays cinebench etc, so you need to wait for real world benchmarks that properly factor in intel's superior single thread performance
 
bAMtan2 said:
unfortunately you and many others have fallen for AMD's very basic marketing trick of holding a party with only the benchmarks that favor them. nobody plays cinebench etc, so you need to wait for real world benchmarks that properly factor in intel's superior single thread performance
Click to expand...

Soon enough man. Give the reviewers some time. Linus Tech Tips just covered some Ryzen goods and showed the Ryzen 1700 with 16GB DDR4 running BF1 at a few frames higher than an intel 6900k with 32GB. He then showed the same systems running DOTA or LoL while streaming and showed the Ryzen cpu's stream and it was smooth compared to the 6900k. I'm just glad that AMD has a competitive CPU again. It's been long enough. I don't care which one is faster. I just care to know if the 65w 1700 will be faster than my undervolted 5820k. All those reviews and data doesn't drop in one day. It will come.

I know it's not an exact comparison. The 7700k is only better because it comes with higher clocks right out of the box. But the 6900k is still no slouch.
 
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bAMtan2 said:
unfortunately you and many others have fallen for AMD's very basic marketing trick of holding a party with only the benchmarks that favor them. nobody plays cinebench etc, so you need to wait for real world benchmarks that properly factor in intel's superior single thread performance
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Exactly, never trust marketing numbers. they are made for marketing.
However, if you believe AMDs test their IPC is as good as Broadwell-E and with that only slightly behind Skylake (so little that the overall architecture and especially how they implemented their cache will make a bigger difference).
I personally wouldn't go for the 8-core CPUs if you only want them for gaming, yes, a few games would profit significantly from that but most of them don't.
I am more interested in the R5 1600X because I think the 6c/12t @ 3.6Ghz boost configuration looks really promising for overclocking (only assumptions). As this CPU has less cores than the R7 CPUs with roughly the same clock speeds I assume you could reasonably push them to 4GHz even with a smaller cooler which would utterly destroy the i7 in 99% of all games.

Furthermore, Intel will have to either drop Cannonlake (not very likely but still possible in the next 4 months?) or they will have to cut their prices. I am looking forward to that.
 
Thanks for the feedback! I'm not going to quote everyone here but I'll try to answer everything.

- I'm aware that there are users of this chassis outside North America as well, however, my guess is that the majority of users in this forum is located there. It doesn't really matter to the overall problem of sending fan clips though.

- Making an L12 that is less tall is something we tried in the past but we weren't happy with the results. The radius of the heatpipe bendings can influence the performance and it might also create compatibility issues with the mounting parts.
Making it that low makes it also difficult to fit a fan underneath without getting the problem you already noticed, that something is front of the fan and creates unwanted noises, let alone compatibility with VRM coolers and memory modules and a 120mm fan (even a slim one).

- The availability of such fan clip packs is pretty bad in Europe, with availability mostly exclusively at Amazon. This is something we could offer as well of course but considering the cut Amazon takes, whose percentage is much bigger for low priced items in relation to the product price, they wouldn't be exactly cheap either. I've seen some parts listed for about 8-10€, which seems realistic to me.
Seeing such prices I'm pretty sure that there would be a quite a number of people accusing us of ripping off customers, which is really not our intention. However, some things are much easier said than actually done and offering such items is unfortunately among those things.

- L9a/i support for AM4 is a long story I won't explain in detail here. Let's just say the only reason why it's not available yet is contradicting information from AMD, motherboard makers and AMD again during the time we had to decide for a production run.
As it looks now I'm optimistic we could have kits available in Q2 already, early Q3 the latest, if there are no unexpected surprises again.

- AM4 CPUs being soldered should definitely help with small coolers like L9a or L9x65 but it also remains to be seen how temperature sensitive these CPUs will be. In the past I had the impression that Intel processors can take high temperatures better than AMD, when it comes to stability under such circumstances. However, the values are difficult to compare, as AMD shows Tcase and Intel allows reading actual internal core temperatures. This might be possible with Ryzen too, thus allowing better comparisons.
 
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I think Ryzen in general is going to make for some interesting events in the CPU market.
While most people here seem to be gamers and so wont benefit as must from the 8 cores, I think it will help people in my position (Computer Aided Design, 3D Rendering etc)

Trying to tie it all back to the Dan A4, I do have a few questions hoping people can chip in on.

1 - Ryzen 1800X is 95 watts. Do people envisage being able to keep one of these reasonably cool with the cpu cooler height restrictions.
2 - Do you guys recommend an i7 7700k intel build or Ryzen 1800X in the Dan A4. (GTX 1080 ti, M.2 SSD, SF450 PSU, 32GB Ram)
 
ahmedelamin_ said:
1 - Ryzen 1800X is 95 watts. Do people envisage being able to keep one of these reasonably cool with the cpu cooler height restrictions.
2 - Do you guys recommend an i7 7700k intel build or Ryzen 1800X in the Dan A4. (GTX 1080 ti, M.2 SSD, SF450 PSU, 32GB Ram)
Click to expand...

For both your questions, I'd say wait a week or two for real-world, unbiased reviews. Theoretical TDP values for 7700k and 1800X are virtually the same but there might always be differences once they are put through the motions including their respective auto-OC features.
 
Oh ryzen.
All I know is that my stomach did somersaults in my stomach and a massive feeling of regret came along as soon as I read initial thoughts and the press conference numbers about ryzen.
I just bought my 7700k 2w ago.
I got.
rekt.

RIP.
 
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