Build advice - Mini iTX build

zef

zef

zef

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Joined
28 Sep 2007
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3
Location
staffs, uk
Hi all, about to take a plunge and refresh my hardware to replace my trusty old Quad Core 6600 system!

Would appreciate it greatly if any of you could critically acclaim my suggestion below. I've left the GPU blank because I'm wondering if the in-built HD4000 graphics will be enough for my means. (I'm a causal gamer)

Case: Lian Li PC-Q08B Mini-ITX
MB: Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe
Proc: Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz
GPU: ????
Cooler: Intel Liquid Cooling Solution CPU Cooler
Mem: Samsung Green (MV-3V4G3D/US) 8GB (2x4GB)
Boot HDD: Crucial RealSSD M4 128GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s
Data HDD: Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB SATA 6Gb/s
PS: Corsair HX+ 750W '80+ Gold'
Monitor: Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24"

System comes in at just over a grand without the GPU.
 
If you're a casual gamer a AMD Trinity based system will be better, but might need to wait a week or two for a ITX FM2 motherboard.
 
Jokester said:
If you're a casual gamer a AMD Trinity based system will be better, but might need to wait a week or two for a ITX FM2 motherboard.
Click to expand...

Totally agree with that.

The trinity chips are great for med-highish setting on most games. Like was said, no mini itx yet. Hopefully should be cheaper than z77 too.

Some of your parts look a bit overspecced too.
 
At 100 posts you would qualify for free delivery. No harm discussing your options and taking your time to plan the build

YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £167.99
1 x HIS HD 7850 IceQ X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (H785QN2G2M) w/ FARCRY3, Nexuiz & Sleeping Dogs PC Games £155.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £98.99
1 x Seasonic G series 550w '80 Plus Gold' Modular Power Supply £76.99
1 x Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G) £71.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £66.66
1 x BitFenix Prodigy 'Yin' Mini-ITX Cube Case - White/Black £64.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £25.99
1 x Samsung SH-S222BB/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £990.07 (includes shipping : £13.75).



How does that look?

or this with a better CLC in the spec, is a little over 1K though sorry

YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £167.99
1 x HIS HD 7850 IceQ X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (H785QN2G2M) w/ FARCRY3, Nexuiz & Sleeping Dogs PC Games £155.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £98.99
1 x Corsair Hydro H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366/LGA2011/AM2/AM3) (CWCH100) £86.98
1 x Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G) £71.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £66.66
1 x BitFenix Prodigy 'Yin' Mini-ITX Cube Case - White/Black £64.99
1 x PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III Series 500W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - White £59.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £25.99
1 x Samsung SH-S222BB/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £1,061.24 (includes shipping : £14.75).

 
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Not mITX. You can OC the APU and should you need a bit more grunt, you can xfire it with a HD6670.

YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £229.99
1 x Samsung 256GB SSD 830 Notebook/Apple Series SATA 6Gb/s KIT with Norton Ghost - (MZ-7PC256N/EU) £143.99
1 x AMD A10-5800K Black Edition 3.80GHz (Socket FM2) APU Trinity Quad Core Processor (AD580KWOHJBOX) £95.99
1 x Xigmatek Gigas Micro ATX Cube Case - Black £86.99
1 x Gigabyte F2A75-D3H AMD A75 Chipset (Socket FM2) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £74.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £66.66
1 x PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III Series 500W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - White £59.99
1 x GeIL EVO Leggera 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-17000C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit (GEL38GB2133C11DC) £39.95
1 x Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler (Socket Intel® Socket LGA1366/1156/1155/775/AMD Socket FM1/AM3+/AM3/AM2+/AM2) £26.99
1 x Samsung SH-S222BB/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £863.64 (includes shipping : £20.10).

 
Thanks to all for some interesting suggestions. Honosuseri's second suggestion does look rather sick, especially the case. I'm tempted to take the plunge and just go with this....

YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2412M 24" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £229.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - Retail £167.99
1 x HIS HD 7850 IceQ X 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (H785QN2G2M) w/ FARCRY3, Nexuiz & Sleeping Dogs PC Games £155.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard £98.99
1 x Corsair Hydro H100 Extreme Performance Liquid CPU Cooler (Socket LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366/LGA2011/AM2/AM3) (CWCH100) £86.98
1 x Kingston HyperX 3K SSD 120GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive (SH103S3/120G) £71.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £66.66
1 x BitFenix Prodigy 'Yin' Mini-ITX Cube Case - White/Black £64.99
1 x PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III Series 500W '80 Plus Bronze' Modular Power Supply - White £59.99
1 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £25.99
1 x Samsung SH-S222BB/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
Total : £1,061.24 (includes shipping : £14.75).

However, like was said by the others, the tantalising M-ITX FM2 boards are just around the corner but I haven't read up much on these and so have no idea of their capabilities.

How would something like an AMD Trinity & ASRock FM2A75M-ITX combo compare to my original Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe & Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz suggestion in terms of price/performance ratio? (No additional GPU installed on either.)

Like I said, I'm not a hard core gamer at the moment but this is something I might get more into if the machine I build can cope with it. At the moment I mainly play Runescape (...I can hear the snickering laughter already!) which I don't think is that demanding since it plays fine on my old setup.

By the way, 2007 was when I last built my system so I'm not exactly up with the times and so I appreciate the great feedback. :)
 
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For gaming, it's a no brainer, the higher end Trinity chips laugh at the Intel iGPU. If you go discrete though the Intel chip will be better, but you do pay more for it.
 
honosuseri said:
At 100 posts you would qualify for free delivery. No harm discussing your options and taking your time to plan the build
Click to expand...

FREE SHIPPING - for loyal OcUK forum members only

WHO QUALIFIES

This offer applies to
OcUK Forums members who have 250 or more posts and have been registered for over 90 days, or
OcUK Forums members who have been registered for over 12 months and made at least 100 posts

:p
 
MAK360 said:
Just the info i've been looking for ;)
Click to expand...
I don't work for the shop - I don't know anything about delivery dates, just patiently waiting for the Asrock board, though it looks like MSI board is going to turn up first, but it's CPU socket is too close to the PCI-E slot for me.
 
ok thanks - still i rather take your dates over the darn months one lol

Edit: Two weeks is a good guess i think (If it was a guess lol) and we should be seeing something soon hopefully. Its as if the MB manufacturers have no clue in what they are doing (They need better analysts). Am kinda upset i waited months for Trinity and am still waiting when i could have gone Intel months ago :(

Sorry for off topic
 
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MAK360 said:
ok thanks - still i rather take your dates over the darn months one lol

Edit: Two weeks is a good guess i think (If it was a guess lol) and we should be seeing something soon hopefully. Its as if the MB manufacturers have no clue in what they are doing (They need better analysts). Am kinda upset i waited months for Trinity and am still waiting when i could have gone Intel months ago :(

Sorry for off topic
Click to expand...

The Asrock FM2A75M-ITX boards are out now, they have been for the last week or so in the UK.

A quick google will find you plenty.
 
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Jokester said:
I don't work for the shop - I don't know anything about delivery dates, just patiently waiting for the Asrock board, though it looks like MSI board is going to turn up first, but it's CPU socket is too close to the PCI-E slot for me.
Click to expand...

Just a heads up on the Asrock board Jokester, I bought 5 last week for builds.
It has a load of IC's on the back of the board that will interfere with backplates from every cooler manufacturer.

I ended up cutting down an AM3 backplate I had lying around for my build (still in progress)
That was to support a Noctua NH-C14, even more headaches then as the way it orientates on this board, it blocks the pci-e slot and precludes the use of tall ram as the heatpipes stand over the ram slots.

Turning it 180 degree's, it then wont fit the case heh.

I had the cooler lying around so no big deal.

Going to be a headache finding decent air coolers to fit this board under 130mm (needs to be for case it's going into)
A BeQuiet Shadowrock Top Down is almost as good as the Noctua but could have the same issues on this board, I doubt any 140mm top down is going to work in my particular build.
I may just use a Scythe Big Shuriken 2 with a BeQuiet Silentwings 120mm fan on it, works great for overclocking IGP@ 1150 and a 4.2ghz CPU overclock in a silent build I did on an Asus F2A8M-PRO.
The Asus board is pure class, such a shame they haven't got an ITX board ready just yet.

I must also point at that at this time the Asrock board won't clock ram (over 1600) that doesn't have an XMP profile for the speed you want. (i.e selecting 1866 requires that ram to have an 1866 XMP profile)

I have some really good sets of Samsung green that do 2600 on Z77 and 2400 with tight timings on an Asus F2A85M-PRO.

On this board they won't go over 1600 no matter what you try, I've been given a few beta bios's by Asrock to try, but the board just won't post with any memory that doesn't have an XMP profile for the speeds higher than 1600.
I've ordered some Gskill Ares 2133 with tight timings so we'll see how that goes when it arrives on Tuesday.

They've truly dropped the ball here with this, I hope to god they get some proper manual ram overclocking working and implemented fast.
The best gaming gains are fast memory and upping the GPU, overclocking the CPU only really matters in non GPU bound games.

Lastly the board has no active cooling, I'd strongly recommend you get some Enzotech mosfet sinks if you plan to clock this board.

This is a budget board (UK price gouging has inflated it beyond it's real market price), it does have potential though, if they get ram overclocking working properly it will be a killer little board.
I'll just use it until Asus get their fingers out and get a Deluxe board with proper socket orientation out.

Roll on Asus Deluxe lol.
 
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Jokester said:
I'm going to be using one of these:-

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HS-021-NC&groupid=701&catid=2330&subcat=

For AMD it uses the existing AMD bracket for attaching the heatsink, plus that'll also help cool everything else on the board.

This is going into an HTPC so I'm not too bothered about lack of overclocking features.
Click to expand...

I'd double check it bud, the only thing supplied with the Asrock board is a 2 piece plastic push in assembly for clip on style coolers.
There is no backplate and every Noctua AMD fitting I've seen requires the AMD backplate to bolt the 'C' mountings onto that holds the cooler in place.

You need a genuine AMD backplate for all Noctua coolers, others such as Thermalright AMD bolt through kits use different threads and won't work with Noctua or anything else that requires an AMD backplate.
 
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