My New Mini ITX build

It's a been a fair while since I built a new machine. It comes with it's own headaches compared to buying a pre-built system but there are several aspects I enjoy. The main factors that drive still drive me towards building myself are:

• Customisation - I want to control every aspect of the design of the machine from looks to performance. The pre-built systems all tend to look very similar.
• Cost - By reading reviews and doing my research I usually find I can build a cheaper PC than the leading manufacturers.
• Off-the-shelf parts used - With a custom build I don't have to rely on Dell/HP etc. telling me what Graphics card will fit inside my computer - I can do the math for myself. I'm not tied into using them again if I want to replace my motherboard in the future - a standard board from any manufacturer will fit. This allows parts to be re-used in future builds such as case, power supply etc.
• Quality of parts used - It's very common for the leading manufacturers to sell inferior quality parts, in general the graphics cards are usually clocked at slower speeds, contain slower memory and have inadequate cooling. In my experience the power supplies used are also barely adequate to run the supplied system.
• Overclocking and tweaking - With a pre-built system you usually find the bios to be devoid of any overclocking options - they don't want to risk you messing with settings, breaking something and then having to contact them for replacement. Due to this they will usually ship with the higher-multiplier locked CPUs, forcing you to search for hacked BIOS' or resort to inferior software-based overclocking. 

This time I'm making this PC for some very different requirements, the main requirements are primarily to use as data storage. I have several Hard disk drives already which I want to reuse, but due to the relatively small capacity (500GB and 1TB) I wanted a case with as many drive bays as possible.

Initially I looked at something like below:

Cheap all-in-one boards like this can be a pretty good option. No CPU or third party heatsink to purchase. The fractal case also comes with it's own custom Power supply unit.

The idea was to have a completely quiet system with a passively cooled CPU, a nice big NAS enclosure (this one housed six 3.5" HDDS!)  - I would be re-using RAM I already have (2x4GB Corsair Vengence DDR3 1600) and the aforementioned HDDS. I planned to install a solution like FreeNAS. The only problem I have with this is the lack of versatility. I considered the costs and decided instead I could get a proper decent computer with it's own dedicated CPU,  mammoth cooler and possibly even have room for a dedicated graphics card. From this I could expect far better performance for the same price. A NAS box like above is fine as long as that's all it will ever be used for - I'm not that disciplined! I wanted instead to build a versatile system that I could upgrade the CPU without having to change the board. I could possibly even hi-jack the system for the weekend to take to a LAN(instead of taking my full-size Coolermaster 932 case!)

I came up with the spec below:

Zalman ZM500-GS, Asus P8H77-I, BitFenix Prodigy, Pentium G630.

 

I know the CPU is pretty weak, but this will change the future. For me this strikes a good balance if of performance vs. cost. 



The parts arrive and here are some images of the build process.

The new parts arrive

The power supply fitted - there is still ample room around it for cable management.



The Mini ITX board - this is the first time I've build a machine with this form-factor.

 

Basic shot of one of the removable hard disk bays.

CPU and Cooler and Ram were installed and then the board was fitted in with ease.

The system build complete

An extra two little cheeky 2.5" drives I was able to add on the side of the case.

Added a full-size Radeon 6870 for testing purposes.

First post to the annoying UEFI bios.

Windows 8 Install and running perfectly for testing purposes.


Now I've had time to play with the build here are some thoughts:

In conclusion, the build is good but not perfect. The case is too big to be a NAS/Media box - to put into perspective this is a bigger chassis than my 2005 Aspire X-Qpack and this housed a full micro atx board.

Above - the old 2005 Aspire X-Qpack - a great thing for LAN parties - when it didn't overheat!

The extra space is used mainly for the 5x (6 if you included the 5.25 bay) 3.5 HDD bays. I ended up putting in 4x 3.5 HDDs and 2x 2.5 HDD. Even then I felt that the noise-to-storage capacity/Energy consumption ratio was uneven. Essentially I could do with less HDDs, but larger than the currently installed 500GB drives. I also added in a full-size Radeon 6870 graphics card just for testing purposes and was able to make it fit by rotating the drive bays around to the face the other way. This works pretty well, but I did notice that the card came into contact with the removable drive-bay enclosure. I was able to get around this issue by putting in a small piece of anti-static bag. This works OK for my card, but cards with memory/heatsinks on both sides might struggle to fit with this design.

One major complaint is that the case doesn't have a built-in card reader and you must either choose a DVD drive or card reader in that single spare 5.25 bay. I ended up doing neither. In the future I may add a card reader into the 5.25" bay for convenience and use a USB DVD drive.

Cable management wise this case is pretty good except for the button board being housed on the side of the case (not sure why this was done as there was plenty of room left on the front of the case!) due to this you end up with some visible cable spaghetti-age. The Freezer 7 rev2 cooler is more than up to the job in this case, but with the RAM being so close to the ZIF socket the corsair vengeance heatsinks did not fit under this. My solution - remove the heatsinks! :)

Performance wise, pretty good (considering a 40 bucks CPU was used) and with the graphics card installed I was able to play Skyrim/Crysis Warhead at high settings fine. In the end I still haven't exactly decided how I'm going to be using this. Initially I bought this thinking I wanted to build a NAS/Media/VM box but now I'm considering replacing my desktop with this.

I know it doesn't really mean much - but here is the Windows experience index score on this machine.