Gaming SFF machine from NUC?

C

chx

Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2011
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There are quite a few great projects here based on the idea of an "upside down" video card and a motherboard to the back of it. It strikes me the recent crop (since Broadwell at least) of NUC motherboards would be much better suited for this -- the M.2 slot provides for a PCI-E x4 slot via a riser (and this format requires a riser anyways) which is enough. At 102x102 they are a great fit to the PCI-E card which is of similar height and the PCI card is 170mm long or so which means a 70x100mm 2.5" HDD is a great fit. The whole thing could be powered off the Dell DA-2 as the NUC needs a 12-19V input. Cabling it wouldn't be too hard as I seem to remember a 8 pin PCI-E to two 6 pin PCI-E splitter fits the DA-2 and there are PCI-E 6 pin to 5.5mm/2.5mm cables as well (for mining). At 220W , you could feed 75W to the PCI-E riser, 75W to a 6 pin and have enough power left for anything but the Skull Canyon.

I suspect the whole thing would be below 2L or even less.
 
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The new Skull Canyon NUC boards could be incredible for this specific usage case - I could possibly see a board, a PSU and full size GPU all mounted in the frame of one of the smaller external GPU cages quite comfortably.
 
I thought that those M.2 pcie 4x on those were set up for memory only or wifi card only or something like that. And that they didn't support gpus? Maybe I'm confusing that with something else.

EDIT -- Oh, I just read that the m.2 doesn't supply the 12v a gpu would need so you need to grab power from a sata or molex line to he gpu.
 
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Here you can see a build log by Aibophobia where he uses the new AsRock Mini-STX motherboard to do exactly what you're talking about

STX160.0 - The most powerful ATX unit, in the world!

The only issue you'll run into with most NuC/STX sized boards is that they while you are correct that they use x 4 for the M.2 slot, it is PCIe 2.0. The specific reason Aibo has chosen to use the AsRock board is that it uses AsRock's Ultra M.2 (PCIe 3.0 x4) which has a 32 Gbps transfer rate (compared to 20 Gbps on the boards using PCIe 2.0 solutions). This is make or break for practical use of a GPU with one of these systems.
 
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