Hello,
I'm building a computer for my friend and he decided he liked the BitFenix Prodigy which means I have to go the MiniITX route. He has already bought the case, RAM (Kingston Hyper Grey 8GB) and an SSD. He has 5 SATA hard drives currently sitting in a USB storage unit so ideally those plus the SSD all need connections although it looks like unless we 'modify' the removeable hard drive bay to fit in the graphics card we will have to remove the bays. That leaves only 2 3.5" HDD bays so potentially only 3 SATA connections will be used.
The CPU will be a 3570k and a AMD 7850 2GB which will be OC'ed. Now i'm a bit stuck on the motherboard as there seems so little range as I want to pair it with a Z77 chipset. Although there is an Asus H77 board for about £83 with 6 SATA connections I am tempted by the Gigabyte boards as I use one myself but the limit of 4 SATA ports total means that the only way to deal with this in the future is to buy a new board completely.
He also needs a PSU to go with the setup, I have a 650 watt in mine but am not sure if he needs all that as MiniITX is more efficient I believe.
Problem is we are currently buying a few components every month and we've decided on the motherboard and PSU but he wants to spend as little as possible without compromising quality too much which makes it a difficult choice as i'm knowhere near familiar with ITX boards and recommended PSU's enough.
Any general help/advice/recommendations appreciated.
I'm building a computer for my friend and he decided he liked the BitFenix Prodigy which means I have to go the MiniITX route. He has already bought the case, RAM (Kingston Hyper Grey 8GB) and an SSD. He has 5 SATA hard drives currently sitting in a USB storage unit so ideally those plus the SSD all need connections although it looks like unless we 'modify' the removeable hard drive bay to fit in the graphics card we will have to remove the bays. That leaves only 2 3.5" HDD bays so potentially only 3 SATA connections will be used.
The CPU will be a 3570k and a AMD 7850 2GB which will be OC'ed. Now i'm a bit stuck on the motherboard as there seems so little range as I want to pair it with a Z77 chipset. Although there is an Asus H77 board for about £83 with 6 SATA connections I am tempted by the Gigabyte boards as I use one myself but the limit of 4 SATA ports total means that the only way to deal with this in the future is to buy a new board completely.
He also needs a PSU to go with the setup, I have a 650 watt in mine but am not sure if he needs all that as MiniITX is more efficient I believe.
Problem is we are currently buying a few components every month and we've decided on the motherboard and PSU but he wants to spend as little as possible without compromising quality too much which makes it a difficult choice as i'm knowhere near familiar with ITX boards and recommended PSU's enough.
Any general help/advice/recommendations appreciated.