Soldato
- Joined
- 1 Jan 2003
- Posts
- 3,156
- Location
- Derbyshire
I wasn't planning on building a SFF PC, but after messing about building an eGPU for my Ally X late last year, it turns out I didnt really need it as the Ally X was great on its own as a portable device without really having any need to dock it. Especially with the faff of cables etc..
So I had a S400 case (inc pcie 4.0 riser), with a very handy handle for portability, housing a SFF v850 PSU (new) powering a 4070Ti TUFOC I'd picked up from MM last year (bargain of the year looking a todays prices!).
I wasn't far away from having a full blown mini PC, so I looked into shopping for some more bits and I've now got a superb little SFF PC that can easily game at 4K with a few tweaks, and will most likely hide behind the TV for some PC sofa gaming.
The build is as follows:
I bought a Ryzen 7 9700x, second hand, only a few months old. Its an extremely capable CPU that boosts high and runs at low Watts, so great at keeping the temperature down inside a small case.
The cooler I bought new, a Noctua NH-L9x65 which is only 65mm high as thats the max height the S400 case supports.
Mini ITX motherboards don't come up for sale second hand too often so that was a new purchase. I couldn't see the point in spending mega money on a bells and whistles mobo, but something that had enough features and was capable of using the unlocked CPU if I fancied tweaking things. I ended up with the AsRock B650i Lightening Wifi, which has turned out to be a cracking purchase.
The memory I also bought new. Some Kingston Fury Beast 32Gb CL32 6400MT/s Black to match the build and low profile as I wasn't sure about any clearance issues....There weren't any as it turned out.
It was relatively easy to do the build, although cable management isnt the easiest in a small case, especially feeding a 4070Ti and Nvidia's 12vhpwr connector/adapter.
At the top of the case I have a 120mm fan running quietly to suck the warm air out of the case and out upwards.
The Noctua CPU fan was a little a too noisy for my liking. It made a rather annoying high pitched whiney noise as it pushed air through the heatsink fins...So that got changed for a 90mm Thermalright fan that sounds a lot nicer as it spins up. Granted its got a different blade design, but the temps on the CPU are still perfectly fine.
After some tweaking I've got the bios set to enable PBO with a 75C limit using a -20mv curve. That seems a very good performance balance for this small system without getting silly temperatures and screaming fans
The memory, I ended up running 6000MT/s at CL30 with 1:1 mode.
The downside:
I plugged this into my 'old' 48" Samsung front room TV....1080P@60Hz Max.......Booooo. I need a new TV now So I'm now eyeing up some LG OLED goodness for the front room.
Even so Games look fantastic running at 4K using DSR downscaled to 1080 locked at 60.... Smooth and looks great.
So I had a S400 case (inc pcie 4.0 riser), with a very handy handle for portability, housing a SFF v850 PSU (new) powering a 4070Ti TUFOC I'd picked up from MM last year (bargain of the year looking a todays prices!).
I wasn't far away from having a full blown mini PC, so I looked into shopping for some more bits and I've now got a superb little SFF PC that can easily game at 4K with a few tweaks, and will most likely hide behind the TV for some PC sofa gaming.
The build is as follows:
I bought a Ryzen 7 9700x, second hand, only a few months old. Its an extremely capable CPU that boosts high and runs at low Watts, so great at keeping the temperature down inside a small case.
The cooler I bought new, a Noctua NH-L9x65 which is only 65mm high as thats the max height the S400 case supports.
Mini ITX motherboards don't come up for sale second hand too often so that was a new purchase. I couldn't see the point in spending mega money on a bells and whistles mobo, but something that had enough features and was capable of using the unlocked CPU if I fancied tweaking things. I ended up with the AsRock B650i Lightening Wifi, which has turned out to be a cracking purchase.
The memory I also bought new. Some Kingston Fury Beast 32Gb CL32 6400MT/s Black to match the build and low profile as I wasn't sure about any clearance issues....There weren't any as it turned out.
It was relatively easy to do the build, although cable management isnt the easiest in a small case, especially feeding a 4070Ti and Nvidia's 12vhpwr connector/adapter.
At the top of the case I have a 120mm fan running quietly to suck the warm air out of the case and out upwards.
The Noctua CPU fan was a little a too noisy for my liking. It made a rather annoying high pitched whiney noise as it pushed air through the heatsink fins...So that got changed for a 90mm Thermalright fan that sounds a lot nicer as it spins up. Granted its got a different blade design, but the temps on the CPU are still perfectly fine.
After some tweaking I've got the bios set to enable PBO with a 75C limit using a -20mv curve. That seems a very good performance balance for this small system without getting silly temperatures and screaming fans
The memory, I ended up running 6000MT/s at CL30 with 1:1 mode.
The downside:
I plugged this into my 'old' 48" Samsung front room TV....1080P@60Hz Max.......Booooo. I need a new TV now
So I'm now eyeing up some LG OLED goodness for the front room.Even so Games look fantastic running at 4K using DSR downscaled to 1080 locked at 60.... Smooth and looks great.
