Itsy-bitsy gaming PC

[Deleted member 11852]

I'm seriously considering building a gaming PC and want to use the most compact case as possible without the thing overheating and/or sounding like a 747. Since horizontal cases seem to have gone the way of the dodo, I'm looking at ATX and thinking about the Corsair Carbide Air 240 series. I'm still pondering components but I'm currently looking at:

• i7-6700K 4Ghz processor (no overclocking)
• Asus Z170M-Plus Intel Z170 m/b
  
• GeForce 1080 Founders Edition (no overclocking)
  
• 550 or 600w PSU (a quiet one) - TBD.
  
• SSD and HDD
• Some form of liquid cooling solution - TBD.

Has anybody got any experience with cramming a moderate CPU and high-end graphics card in an ATX case?

Also has anybody any experience with the be quiet! brand of PSUs? They seem fairly ubiquitous here in the UK but I've never heard of them but then the last PC I built had a 3Ghz Pentium 4, so it's been a while and any suggestions are very much appreciated.

 

[orangpelupa]

you already chose water cooling so it is already quiete. as for PSU, you can use those passively cooled PSU. it should make no sounds except coil whine if unlucky.

Since horizontal cases seem to have gone the way of the dodo

can't you just put vertical case in horizontal position?

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Passive psus are a waste of money. Better to get one that is semi passive. Then it will be passive when idle (the time you want it to be silent) and turn on when gaming and that little bit of psu fan noise is inaudible anyway.

Micro atx should be fine. I got a micro atx case with a i7, r9 290 and a few hdds and ambient temperature can be high here. Never had any problems apart from the gpu being not-so-silent when gaming.

 

[tabs]

@DSoup I use a BeQuiet PSU - the 700W Straight Power 10. Hard to say how quiet it really is as my radiator fans for the CPU are the only clearly audible thing unless my GPU is under massive load on a warm day. Had no problems with it; although if you're into looks the wires that come out of the sheaths are multi coloured rather than black. Performance wise it's given me no trouble, and I have many power hungry USB devices, hard drives, over clocked and volted CPU + 980Ti.

If you're shopping at amazon, remember to use the b3d referral link:
www.amazon.co.uk/ref=as_li_ss_tl?_encoding=UTF8&camp=1634&creative=19450&linkCode=ur2&tag=b3d-21

Wish I could find the thread that was orginally posted in by @Rys so it doesn't look like I'm posting one for myself. I guess the b3d at the end makes it look more legit.

On water cooling and noise: I wouldn't say they're by default going to be quiet. In fact there are some extremely quiet air coolers available which would be better and cheaper if noise is the main concern.

 

[Deleted member 11852]

@orangpelupa - orientation can impact airflow of some cases. A chases is engineered for heat to rise and the fans to vent it efficiently. But no, a tower sideways is too wide - or high when on it's side.

@tongue_of_colicab - many thanks

@tabs - thanks, I'm not looking (or expecting) a silent system but if the option is a conventional PSU or one designed to be quiet I'll take the quiet one! What does the referral link do?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

I have the same case, I do keep it horizontally with the window facing up. I only have a mini-ITX motherboard in there, so that I could put more fans in. If you want to keep it quiet I would suggest forgetting the founders edition. I know the idea of the card pushing the air out sounds really good, but those things are very noisy compared to other style of coolers and now the founders edition seemingly being more expensive as well, I strongly recommend getting something like the EVGA ACX model. Those are the same height as the reference coolers, which is important in that Corsair case as it doesn't have room for cards such as the Asus Strix or MSI Gaming.

The case fans should be able to handle that heat load and since you are not overclocking the CPU, it is going to be fine with slightly higher ambient temperatures.

 

[Deleted member 13524]

Also has anybody any experience with the be quiet! brand of PSUs?

They're definitely in the top 5 list of best PSU makers in Europe, along with Seasonic, XFX, EVGA and Silverstone.

Warranty support is top notch.
I once bought a used BeQuiet through some forums and the PSU came broken (and the guy disappeared from the internet.. yeah..). I sent the company an e-mail explaining that I had a broken PSU from them but I didn't have any proof of purchase with me.
They just asked for the serial number and told me to send them my PSU afterwards.
A week and a half later I had a brand new PSU from a newer and more expensive generation at my place.



TLDR: Got tricked by some dude by buying him a broken and old 600W BeQuiet PSU for 50€. Sent the broken PSU to BeQuiet without proof of purchase or anything and they sent me back a brand new modular 650W PSU worth ~200€ at the time.

 

[tabs]

@DSoup The referral link basically gives beyond3d a cut of whatever you spend on amazon, at no cost to you.

 

[Grall]

A chases is engineered for heat to rise and the fans to vent it efficiently. But no, a tower sideways is too wide - or high when on it's side.

Convection is incredibly weak*, you must have nearly (preferably completely) undisturbed airflow for it to work properly. As soon as you throw forced air flows into the mix (IE: fans), convection goes basically entirely out the window. The idea that hot air rises in PC cases and cools your stuff is a nice thought, but that's all it is.

*This is why hot air balloons are so incredibly large and can't lift all that much in the big scheme of things, btw...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Has anybody got any experience with cramming a moderate CPU and high-end graphics card in an ATX case?

You should be fine. I used to build compact gaming machines for people that used the Silverstone SUGO line of mini-ITX cases which are significantly smaller than that Carbide case. I even had a few customers that wanted a Radeon 2900 XT in theirs! A quite hot, noisy, and power hungry GPU. And all of that with only air cooling back in the day. With water cooling I don't see any potential issues.

The nice thing about them was that you could easily fit them into just about any old school grade backpack which made them extremely easy to take to LANs or even as carry on luggage on airplanes. Security always gave me a weird look when taking it out of my backpack and putting it through the X-ray machine though. But yeah, small and extremely powerful.

As many have mentioned Be Quiet is a decent brand. I usually go with Seasonic myself.

Regards,
SB

 

[Grall]

I'd like an uATX case that does not have any traditional drive cages, like my Silverstone Fortress FT03. Unfortunately, that chassis is out of production, so I can't buy any more of them...

We're at the stage where the 3.5" drive is largely obsolete for anything except mass storage, and I personally don't have the amount of data that having multiple drive cages can be justified; all they do is take up shitloads of space for no good reason. What I need is a couple 2.5" mounting positions, and that's it.

Haven't found any chassis that ticks all the checkboxes I have, which is really depressing...

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I'd like an uATX case that does not have any traditional drive cages, like my Silverstone Fortress FT03. Unfortunately, that chassis is out of production, so I can't buy any more of them...

We're at the stage where the 3.5" drive is largely obsolete for anything except mass storage, and I personally don't have the amount of data that having multiple drive cages can be justified; all they do is take up shitloads of space for no good reason. What I need is a couple 2.5" mounting positions, and that's it.

Haven't found any chassis that ticks all the checkboxes I have, which is really depressing...

There are 2.5" drive enclosures that fit into 3.5" drive slots that will hold 2x 2.5" drives. They are generally designed for an exterior 3.5" slot but nothing prevents you from using them in an internal 3.5" slot (which is what I'm doing).

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

I have the same case, I do keep it horizontally with the window facing up. I only have a mini-ITX motherboard in there, so that I could put more fans in. If you want to keep it quiet I would suggest forgetting the founders edition. I know the idea of the card pushing the air out sounds really good, but those things are very noisy compared to other style of coolers and now the founders edition seemingly being more expensive as well, I strongly recommend getting something like the EVGA ACX model. Those are the same height as the reference coolers, which is important in that Corsair case as it doesn't have room for cards such as the Asus Strix or MSI Gaming.

Thanks and good about about the card height.

They're definitely in the top 5 list of best PSU makers in Europe, along with Seasonic, XFX, EVGA and Silverstone.

Appreciated, I can buy with some confidence then.

@DSoup The referral link basically gives beyond3d a cut of whatever you spend on amazon, at no cost to you.

Gotchya, will do!

Convection is incredibly weak*, you must have nearly (preferably completely) undisturbed airflow for it to work properly. As soon as you throw forced air flows into the mix (IE: fans), convection goes basically entirely out the window. The idea that hot air rises in PC cases and cools your stuff is a nice thought, but that's all it is.

Hot air has a lower density than cooler air so will rise, this why you want vents higher up in a case and this is how most cases position venting. I know most people just shove a load of fans in a case and hope for the best but better positioned vents and fewer fans with planned air flow works. How do I know? One, I'm an engineer by trade and two, we've experimented a lot in our server farm environments. Racks are actually quite easy to re-orientate and having them vertical instead of horizontal would make the fibre cabling easier but the thermal imaging camera shows a huge heat build up and redesigning the cooling definitely isn't simple.

You should be fine. I used to build compact gaming machines for people that used the Silverstone SUGO line of mini-ITX cases which are significantly smaller than that Carbide case. I even had a few customers that wanted a Radeon 2900 XT in theirs! A quite hot, noisy, and power hungry GPU. And all of that with only air cooling back in the day. With water cooling I don't see any potential issues.

Thanks! I had a a Shuttle XPC (ATX) case a long time back as my media PC so I've worked with the form factor before.

 

[Grall]

Hot air has a lower density than cooler air so will rise, this why you want vents higher up in a case and this is how most cases position venting.

Like I said, it just doesn't work that way when you have fans involved. Hot air is more tenuous, yes, but the difference is minute and fans immediately overpower air's tendency to rise. You could just as well have all your intakes at the top and blow air out the bottom of your chassis, it doesn't matter one iota. You will notice no difference on temps. Actually, your CPU might run cooler, as its cooling air won't get pre-heated by passing by your GPU first...

 

[Grall]

There are 2.5" drive enclosures that fit into 3.5" drive slots that will hold 2x 2.5" drives.

Yeah, but I don't need room for 4-6 times two 2.5" drives. I might need two, period. One would probably be enough, for a 2TB SATA SSD, and then a system drive sitting on a PCIe 4x chewing gum stick mounted on the mobo itself.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Yeah, but I don't need room for 4-6 times two 2.5" drives. I might need two, period. One would probably be enough, for a 2TB SATA SSD, and then a system drive sitting on a PCIe 4x chewing gum stick mounted on the mobo itself.

Makes sense, I only mentioned that because you said you needed 2x 2.5" drive bays instead of 1x 3.5" drive bay.

We're at the stage where the 3.5" drive is largely obsolete for anything except mass storage, and I personally don't have the amount of data that having multiple drive cages can be justified; all they do is take up shitloads of space for no good reason. What I need is a couple 2.5" mounting positions, and that's it.

And many of the SFF cases that I used to work with only came with 1x 3.5" drive bay. I haven't really looked at more recent ones, although I probably will soon. A few people are bugging me to build them a portable SFF gaming rig. I'm waiting until Polaris and the 1070 officially launch, however, before I give it serious thought.

For me the ideal for a general use SFF would be 1x 2.5" drive bay and 1x 3.5" drive bay. For a gaming oriented one with low storage requirements, 2x 2.5" or M.2 + 2.5" would be just fine.

One thing I've found, however, is that as long as there's room "somewhere" a 2.5" drive bay isn't necessarily needed if you are going to use an SSD. It is light and has no parts which can be damaged with movement. That means you can just duct tape it to just about any surface or even hang it by some thread or wire if there isn't an convenient place to duct tape it to.

It doesn't look fantastic, but it doesn't matter what it looks like if it's not something you're going to be looking at. And it works just fine. My current main desktop machine has my 2.5" SSD game drive just duct taped to the side of a 5.25" drive cage.

Regards,
SB

 

[tabs]

Yep, I had so many drives in my old machine I ran out of bays so taped an SSD to the side of the cage.

My new case has a slot for an SSD to just slide into on the back of the motherboard side where you'd hide the wires. I can see this sort of thing becoming a lot more common in future.

 

[Grall]

And many of the SFF cases that I used to work with only came with 1x 3.5" drive bay.

Which cases would that be? ITX format, I assume? Because I've not seen any uATX case THAT barebones.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Which cases would that be? ITX format, I assume? Because I've not seen any uATX case THAT barebones.

Yeah it was almost exclusively mini ITX. My customers wanted gaming systems that were as portable as possible and laptops didn't cut it. Also had a few that could do with Shuttle systems which was roughly the same size.

Regards,
SB

 

[Deleted member 11852]

Thanks all. I've ordered my bits and managed to get a launch GTX 1080 for the system, which is nice.

Now I just need to find a decent wireless keyboard/mouse/trackball combo.