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A friend of mine wanted me to make a build log for my most recent system, so I dug up my account (I haven't posted here in years) and made this. Hope ya enjoy!
It was time to build a new system, so I decided to go ultra small form factor. I've been tracking the SFF build community for awhile, and had small form factor systems ever since mATX boards started getting decent. I think my first SFF build was a Opteron 939 in a Q-Pack. Since then, I've had a Micro Fly, a SG01, a few shuttles, and my most recent build before this one was a ThermalTake Lanbox Lite. The "Lite" wasn't really that light or small, so I decided to go all-out on this build, both upgrading on the baseline specs of the Lanbox, and going less than half the size.
I chose the Silverstone SG05 because it's the smallest thing I could find that would fit a good graphics card. The small 450w PSU that can somehow handle high-end cards appealed to me greatly, especially considering the massive power usage of the 1000w PSU I had in the Lanbox.
My specs for the new system are:
- Silverstone SG05 case w/ 450w integrated PSU
- Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe Mini ITX motherboard
- Intel i7 3770 processor
- eVGA GTX680 (4GB edition) video card
- 2x Kingston DDR3 16GB DIMMS (32GB total) memory
- 4x Samsung 830 series 256GB SSDs (512GB total unformatted, RAID 10) storage
- LG Blu-Ray burner from an USB external enclosure
- Corsair Hydro H50 watercooling kit
I'll use the integrated RAID controller on the motherboard for the RAID10 -- no room for a discrete RAID card (sadly, I would have liked something with flash-backed cache).
Before we begin, here's the old system. It's served me well, but is beyond XBox huge. I'm reusing the processor, SSDs, and one of the sff drives. The specs are: TT Lanbox Lite, Asus Maximus GeneZ, i7 3770, eVGA GTX460, 2x 8GB DDR3 DIMMS, some horrendously loud 1000w PSU (I was going to do SLI, but decided against it), icydock with 4x Samsung 830 SSDs, dual sff burners (one blu ray), standard aircooling. The system's loud, hefty, and can hardly be considered an SFF system:
Time to dive into the build! Please note all pictures were taken with a cameraphone, so I apologize for the quality (lack thereof). Here's the new system and much of the components next to the old. Some of the components (proc, disks, optical) are still in the old box:
Close-up on the new case. It's more of a matte finish than the gloss of the Lanbox:
You can REALLY see the size difference here. The SG05 is tiny! Awesome!
Close-up on the motherboard. It has integrated wireless, which will be nice. Excellent fit and finish, as I've grown to expect from Asus. They make good product.
CPU close-up. I was an AMD fanboy back when I had an Opteron 146 in 2005. I'm an Intel fan now:
Video card -- eVGA GTX680. I've deployed hundreds of eVGA cards in builds at work, and have had a 0% failure rate. Just like Asus, they make good product. This card fits in the case with less than 1mm to spare. More on that later.
SSDs and optical drive removed from the old system. You can see the HUGE high-gain antennas I was going to use (I didn't, they were too big) and the handle that will go on top:
Corsair's watercooling solution. I've done homebuilt watercooling, then a few years later used more money in DangerDen gear than I'm willing to admit. Lately I switched back to aircooling, but the low cost of the H50 coupled with the small size of this build made watercooling mandatory.
That's all for components. To apologize for the bad or inconsistent picture quality, here is a picture of my dog:
I tore right into the case. The top portion of the SG05 is a large clamshell that's a bit light in material, but still sturdy enough to get the job done. I removed the stock drive cage on the top for both the optical drive and disk drive to make room for the watercooling. Normally, the 120mm fan is shallow enough to accomodate a 3.5" drive, but the H50+fan is far too thick. The 3.5" section will have to go.
After some drilling and gentle persuasion, we have a shallow cage to support just the blu-ray burner:
Burner mounted:
Time to test-fit the watercooling and SSDs:
Overall view:
The SSD array will fit next to the PSU, wedged under the case's top support rail. I'll have to fabricate a bracket. Luckily, I have spare material from the old 3.5" drive cage that I removed.
Tight squeeze!
Tools for the mod. Ryobi battery-powered angle grinder, drill, straightedge, cutting wheel for grinder, and smoothing wheel for grinder. Beer was mandatory too. Lots of beer. My beer of choice for this build was Nitro Milk Stout, it's good stuff, you should try some.
I'll have half of the SSD array mount on the support rail, and the other half on a bracket with a flag on it to sit on top of the PSU. They'll be WEDGED in there, so there's no reason to screw the side on the PSU down.The donor drive cage:
Drawing out the bracket:
Close-up on completed markings:
Grind it! My other hand was holding a beer while I was grinding, so no pics of sparks, sorry.
Close-up of bracket. Gotta drill those holes next.
Holes drilled, edges smoothed to mitigate risk of tetanus. They're sloppy, but I don't care, screws will cover my lack of precison attributable to a severe lack of drill press. Unrelated, if anyone wants to donate a drill press to the cause, my dog will thank you. It'll give me a spare hand to throw her ball with.
Now I have to grind out the edge railing and bend it down so that I can get the other side of the SSDs mounted.
Closer view of the notch:
I flipped the case over, bent out at the notch and marked for holes:
I completely failed to take a pic of the holes drilled. Oh well. You'll have to trust me that there were in fact 4 holes drilled to mount the rear screws of the SSDs. I mounted the SSDs to my ghettaculous mounting bracket. Functional!
Another view:
I cleaned up the case and started to mount everything.Here's the motherboard and watercooling:
Next, I went to mount the video card. Remember how I said there was roughly a millimeter of clearance when I first mentioned the GPU? I lied, there's basically no clearance. I had to insert it through the fan hole, put the DVI ports through the rear card slots in proper alignment, rotate it the last 10 degrees into place then slide it down. Ridiculous. But it FITS!!! BWAHAHA!!!!
Only problem is, the card's so fat that it touches the rad. The 680 I bought has a pretty backplane cover, but I'd rather there be an airgap there, so the rad's gotta get moved. I marked new holes:
And installed the rad slightly offset:
And now all is well in my case:
With the SSDs being so close together, I had to do some custom cabling. Luckily, some SATA connectors are modular, and can easily be crimped on. I had a spare old PSU with modular connectors so I *gently* removed them and started crimping them in place.
The stack of crimped connectors, completed:
If only I had won the lottery or something, I could have gone with 1TB SSDs. That storage density + speed, GAH that would have been awesome. But I'd rather buy a new(er) car than spend that much on SSDs, so here we are reusing 256GB SSDs. Attached with SATA cables:
I realized that I only had 4 SATA connectors on the motherboard too late. That's okay, I'll McGyver this -- I took a USB front panel connector, cannibalized the motherboard end, and paired the +5, data1, data2, and GND connectors to the associated ends on a USB type miniB cable to adapt an external USB disc drive controller board to USB. I lost my soldering iron, wire strippers, and heat shrink wrap in the last move (actually found it all last week, but it was still lost at the time of this build), so I twisted the wires together, using my teeth to strip the wires and using medical tape as electrical tape. Huzzah!
Tight fit, but it'll do! Look at that fat stack of SSDs crammed in there. Wonderful.
With all the hardware built and installed, I'll add the handle so I can use this thing to club baby seals AND pwn noobs. It only took a moment to line it up, drill the holes, and insert random fasteners:
Mount that on top! Bam!
Completed, with the 24" monitor I use. I have a second, I'll have to get pics of my battlestation up later.
Temps are all good -- the GPU stays around 70C, the CPU below 50C, and the SSDs usually hang out at around 45C with a heavy load. It's relatively quiet -- the loudest component by far is the 680. Let me know if any of you want pics of anything else, I took pics hastily during the process with no intention of posting, and only made this build log because a friend of mine thought my system was epic and logworthy.
It was time to build a new system, so I decided to go ultra small form factor. I've been tracking the SFF build community for awhile, and had small form factor systems ever since mATX boards started getting decent. I think my first SFF build was a Opteron 939 in a Q-Pack. Since then, I've had a Micro Fly, a SG01, a few shuttles, and my most recent build before this one was a ThermalTake Lanbox Lite. The "Lite" wasn't really that light or small, so I decided to go all-out on this build, both upgrading on the baseline specs of the Lanbox, and going less than half the size.
I chose the Silverstone SG05 because it's the smallest thing I could find that would fit a good graphics card. The small 450w PSU that can somehow handle high-end cards appealed to me greatly, especially considering the massive power usage of the 1000w PSU I had in the Lanbox.
My specs for the new system are:
- Silverstone SG05 case w/ 450w integrated PSU
- Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe Mini ITX motherboard
- Intel i7 3770 processor
- eVGA GTX680 (4GB edition) video card
- 2x Kingston DDR3 16GB DIMMS (32GB total) memory
- 4x Samsung 830 series 256GB SSDs (512GB total unformatted, RAID 10) storage
- LG Blu-Ray burner from an USB external enclosure
- Corsair Hydro H50 watercooling kit
I'll use the integrated RAID controller on the motherboard for the RAID10 -- no room for a discrete RAID card (sadly, I would have liked something with flash-backed cache).
Before we begin, here's the old system. It's served me well, but is beyond XBox huge. I'm reusing the processor, SSDs, and one of the sff drives. The specs are: TT Lanbox Lite, Asus Maximus GeneZ, i7 3770, eVGA GTX460, 2x 8GB DDR3 DIMMS, some horrendously loud 1000w PSU (I was going to do SLI, but decided against it), icydock with 4x Samsung 830 SSDs, dual sff burners (one blu ray), standard aircooling. The system's loud, hefty, and can hardly be considered an SFF system:
Time to dive into the build! Please note all pictures were taken with a cameraphone, so I apologize for the quality (lack thereof). Here's the new system and much of the components next to the old. Some of the components (proc, disks, optical) are still in the old box:
Close-up on the new case. It's more of a matte finish than the gloss of the Lanbox:
You can REALLY see the size difference here. The SG05 is tiny! Awesome!
Close-up on the motherboard. It has integrated wireless, which will be nice. Excellent fit and finish, as I've grown to expect from Asus. They make good product.
CPU close-up. I was an AMD fanboy back when I had an Opteron 146 in 2005. I'm an Intel fan now:
Video card -- eVGA GTX680. I've deployed hundreds of eVGA cards in builds at work, and have had a 0% failure rate. Just like Asus, they make good product. This card fits in the case with less than 1mm to spare. More on that later.
SSDs and optical drive removed from the old system. You can see the HUGE high-gain antennas I was going to use (I didn't, they were too big) and the handle that will go on top:
Corsair's watercooling solution. I've done homebuilt watercooling, then a few years later used more money in DangerDen gear than I'm willing to admit. Lately I switched back to aircooling, but the low cost of the H50 coupled with the small size of this build made watercooling mandatory.
That's all for components. To apologize for the bad or inconsistent picture quality, here is a picture of my dog:
I tore right into the case. The top portion of the SG05 is a large clamshell that's a bit light in material, but still sturdy enough to get the job done. I removed the stock drive cage on the top for both the optical drive and disk drive to make room for the watercooling. Normally, the 120mm fan is shallow enough to accomodate a 3.5" drive, but the H50+fan is far too thick. The 3.5" section will have to go.
After some drilling and gentle persuasion, we have a shallow cage to support just the blu-ray burner:
Burner mounted:
Time to test-fit the watercooling and SSDs:
Overall view:
The SSD array will fit next to the PSU, wedged under the case's top support rail. I'll have to fabricate a bracket. Luckily, I have spare material from the old 3.5" drive cage that I removed.
Tight squeeze!
Tools for the mod. Ryobi battery-powered angle grinder, drill, straightedge, cutting wheel for grinder, and smoothing wheel for grinder. Beer was mandatory too. Lots of beer. My beer of choice for this build was Nitro Milk Stout, it's good stuff, you should try some.
I'll have half of the SSD array mount on the support rail, and the other half on a bracket with a flag on it to sit on top of the PSU. They'll be WEDGED in there, so there's no reason to screw the side on the PSU down.The donor drive cage:
Drawing out the bracket:
Close-up on completed markings:
Grind it! My other hand was holding a beer while I was grinding, so no pics of sparks, sorry.
Close-up of bracket. Gotta drill those holes next.
Holes drilled, edges smoothed to mitigate risk of tetanus. They're sloppy, but I don't care, screws will cover my lack of precison attributable to a severe lack of drill press. Unrelated, if anyone wants to donate a drill press to the cause, my dog will thank you. It'll give me a spare hand to throw her ball with.
Now I have to grind out the edge railing and bend it down so that I can get the other side of the SSDs mounted.
Closer view of the notch:
I flipped the case over, bent out at the notch and marked for holes:
I completely failed to take a pic of the holes drilled. Oh well. You'll have to trust me that there were in fact 4 holes drilled to mount the rear screws of the SSDs. I mounted the SSDs to my ghettaculous mounting bracket. Functional!
Another view:
I cleaned up the case and started to mount everything.Here's the motherboard and watercooling:
Next, I went to mount the video card. Remember how I said there was roughly a millimeter of clearance when I first mentioned the GPU? I lied, there's basically no clearance. I had to insert it through the fan hole, put the DVI ports through the rear card slots in proper alignment, rotate it the last 10 degrees into place then slide it down. Ridiculous. But it FITS!!! BWAHAHA!!!!
Only problem is, the card's so fat that it touches the rad. The 680 I bought has a pretty backplane cover, but I'd rather there be an airgap there, so the rad's gotta get moved. I marked new holes:
And installed the rad slightly offset:
And now all is well in my case:
With the SSDs being so close together, I had to do some custom cabling. Luckily, some SATA connectors are modular, and can easily be crimped on. I had a spare old PSU with modular connectors so I *gently* removed them and started crimping them in place.
The stack of crimped connectors, completed:
If only I had won the lottery or something, I could have gone with 1TB SSDs. That storage density + speed, GAH that would have been awesome. But I'd rather buy a new(er) car than spend that much on SSDs, so here we are reusing 256GB SSDs. Attached with SATA cables:
I realized that I only had 4 SATA connectors on the motherboard too late. That's okay, I'll McGyver this -- I took a USB front panel connector, cannibalized the motherboard end, and paired the +5, data1, data2, and GND connectors to the associated ends on a USB type miniB cable to adapt an external USB disc drive controller board to USB. I lost my soldering iron, wire strippers, and heat shrink wrap in the last move (actually found it all last week, but it was still lost at the time of this build), so I twisted the wires together, using my teeth to strip the wires and using medical tape as electrical tape. Huzzah!
Tight fit, but it'll do! Look at that fat stack of SSDs crammed in there. Wonderful.
With all the hardware built and installed, I'll add the handle so I can use this thing to club baby seals AND pwn noobs. It only took a moment to line it up, drill the holes, and insert random fasteners:
Mount that on top! Bam!
Completed, with the 24" monitor I use. I have a second, I'll have to get pics of my battlestation up later.
Temps are all good -- the GPU stays around 70C, the CPU below 50C, and the SSDs usually hang out at around 45C with a heavy load. It's relatively quiet -- the loudest component by far is the 680. Let me know if any of you want pics of anything else, I took pics hastily during the process with no intention of posting, and only made this build log because a friend of mine thought my system was epic and logworthy.
