My 7.9L custom case with extreme cooling capability

GautamB

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Aug 30, 2018
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...by ultra SFF standards at least...

This is a design that I originally built by hand about 2 years ago, and recently had manufactured. Nothing on the market has good enough heatsink clearance at a compact enough size to satisfy me. My design trades the ability to take a full-size GPU in order to use larger pancake-style heatsinks, or AIO's, and have proper exhaust from the front.

This allows for either extreme quietness or extreme performance.

Complete dimensions are 108mm x 209mm x 350mm = 7.9L. First, I wanted to stay below 7L, then 7.2L, then 7.5L, and then I ended up here. So it goes.

The overall performance is ahead of anything else in its size class, at least until the new nVidia cards hit. Even though it's restricted to mini GPU's, it can still fit a Zotac 1080ti Mini, so even the GPU performance is close to as good as cases that allow full-size GPU's, for the time being.

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I've stuffed two builds into it.

One is completely silent, with an i7 6700K @ 4.3GHz 1.15v, cooled by a Raijintek Pallas + Noctua P14S and Gigabyte GTX 1070 Mini. The fans are set to max out at below 600 RPM, so even when running things like Furmark or AVX Prime95, it remains inaudible at anything farther away than a foot or so. You'll note that it uses a FlexATX PSU, which are notoriously loud. I get around this by removing the PSU's fan altogether, and wiring up a 92mm Nexus Real SIlent fan (15dto blow in through the back. It's been working great for 2 years in this arrangement.

Here's a gallery of the first build:
https://imgur.com/a/DQax85c

The second build offers close to the highest performance available on the market. It has parts taken from a rendering rig to become a mobile rendering rig. An i9 7960X @ 4.4GHz 1.2v cooled by a Corsair H90 + Noctua NF-A14 iPPC-3000 with a Zotac 1080ti Mini. The cooling setup is good enough to handle the CPU dissipating 300W while still remaining around or below 90C, no delidding. This config could theoretically fit an SFX-L PSU in place of the FlexATX unit if the case were widened by a couple of mm, which is something I'm looking into.

Here's a gallery of the second build:
https://imgur.com/a/I78J67o

A 9900K with a healthy overclock shouldn't be a problem when the time comes.
 
It might not be a factor to you, but I'm very curious to know how loud this is - at idle and under load while playing a demanding game.
 
It might not be a factor to you, but I'm very curious to know how loud this is - at idle and under load while playing a demanding game.
It's not only a factor, it's the most important factor to me.

The first setup makes next to zero noise- ever. I'd actually go as far as to say it's one of the quietest SFF systems out there, and I don't think it's possible to get quieter at its size and performance level. The CPU and GPU fans are Noctua P14S Reduxes which I picked specifically for the noise signature- the new ones are also great, but at very low RPM (300-500), the Reduxes are a bit more pleasant.

The case was designed around absolute silence. That's why I don't use any slim fans. I could have made it smaller than a DAN case by reducing the heatsink clearance to ~75mm and having slim exhaust fans instead of 25mm ones. I opted for the latter.

The second one is reasonable at idle, moderate during gaming (replaced the 1080ti's stock fans with quieter Arctic F9's) and is a jet engine during video rendering. Like for the CPU, the GPU also has room for standard 25mm fans on top. Bear in mind, gaming puts very little load on a 16 core CPU. Cooling 4-8 cores is very easy for this setup. The real challenge for SFF systems is dealing with heavy CPU loads. Granted, this sort of load is pretty unusual in the community, but not that unusual for content creators.
 
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