"Traditional" layout super dense ITX gaming case?

chx

Gawd
Joined
Jun 21, 2011
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I have an old Silverstone chassis with the NT-06 cooler and the PSU above the motherboard providing CPU cooling, no separate CPU fan needed. But the NT-06 is quite high, the Prolimatech Samuel is 45mm and the Thermalright AXP-100 is 44mm.

So here's my thought: an ATX PSU is only 140x150, slightly smaller footprint than the ITX motherboard. So that's the chassis would look like: motherboard, heatsink touching the ATX PSU and then space next to them for an ITX gaming card, the height is right, those cards are 135mm high, an ATX PSU is 86mm high so a 45mm heatsink would fit. It would certainly be packed to the gills, once assembled there's no empty space that's for sure.

So the case interiors are about 170mm along the PCIe slot axis, the height is again roughly 170mm perhaps a little less, and across you need 170+40 for the dual slot card=210mm. So the outer dimensions would be about 190x190x230 -- about 8 litres with an ATX PSU. Is this a very crazy idea?
 
What about storage? M.2 at the bottom of the board?

Can you stay cool without any intake fans?
 
Sounds like you want a shorter version of the Silverstone SG13.
 
Sounds reasonable to me as long as you have enough vents on the panels for the PSU fan to draw air from and don't use a CPU with a very high TDP. Have you factored in that the PEG connectors on the GPU need about 2cm of space as well? People often overlook that.
 
Depending on how much power you need, you could switch to a smaller form factor Silverstone SFX power supply. You might be able to fit in a smaller cooler like a Scythe SCBSK-2100 Big Shuriken 2 Rev. B which has a low profile fan.
 
I've made a concept of such a case some time ago:
I've done a quicke layout for such case and it could be nice if some manufacturer went with it but it's something that should be done as mass produced and really cheap unit.



It would be a 6L cube with dimensions of 210 x 190 x 150 mm

There should also be some kind of psu weight support.

The ssd location is something for consideration though.

But it actually originates from theGryphon's idea from his thread here:
A 6lt mITX Cube Design

However I think he had problems with making it ready for manufacturing not mentioning to about proper looks.

I think that making it with full ATX psu isn't a good idea since manufactured cases are pretty damn close to what you could achieve considering you need to think about space for the power cables and hard drives as well.
 
That sounds a bit like the PC I built 7 years ago in a Silverstone SG03. I had a NT-06 right up to a 600W Silverstone strider PSU on a Q6600 (95W TDP) overclocked by 33%. 2x Geforce 460s in SLI (which I think are 150W cards). Temperatures were manageable but not great. Had 2x 120MM fans on the front so I think you'd be fine with a reasonable quality modern low-profile cooler. The SG03 allows you to mount the PSU with the fan either pulling air from inside or outside so if your case also allows for that you should mount it with the fan pulling from outside if you're using a CPU cooler. Just make sure you have at least one 120mm or two 80mm case fans set up as intake fans.

Here's some pictures, this is before I got the second 460 I think:



 
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