valentin_rad
Description
There's something to be said about very complex things made to fit into very small packages. My first ever such fascination was the plain mechanical watch, then I discovered James Bond and spy watches, then I grew up and smart watches became a reality. Sadly that reality was less mind blowing than I had imagined but my fascination remained... and then I discovered mini-itx!
It used to be the case that SFF PCs were kinda a niche thing and the parts for them came at a premium. But now, in 2021 that's not the case anymore and there's plenty to choose from either on the new or second hand market.
I decided to give it a go and see what I could put together. At the same time I couldn't shake the feeling that there was going to be a dealbreaker in the process and I'd have to scrap the whole thing, hence the name. To my surprise things went quite smoothly and I was happy with the result :D
Video detailing the whole build process - https://youtu.be/dFsjhVgCNGQ
Part Reviews
Motherboard
At the same price, Gigabyte and AsRock were selling A320 based motherboards so I think I made a good choice by going with a lesser known brand and getting a better chipset.
Case
It looks nice but the thermals aren't that great. It doesn't have any internal fans so there's nothing to move the air around. The Ryzen 2600 does fine in this case but the GTX 970 is kinda starved for air and it will go up to 80 C rather quickly. It doesn't throttle, it's just loud, should have gone with a two or three fan model instead.
Power Supply
This thing's quiet, 80+ Gold and comes in at a great price to boot. It sucks that Corsair doesn't have an ATX model with the same build quality/price and I don't understand why. I'm seriously considering using only SF450s or SF600s for all my future builds.
Comments