Something Small for my new office

LOAM · 27 Mar 2013 at 10:04

Morning people. On May 1st we are moving out of my back bedroom where we have been operating for the last year or so into a new office in Nottingham. I have been using my usual day to day PC and monitors for work but thats not going to be the case when we move.

I really dont want a laptop, I just dont get on with them that well but I do want something that I can fling in my bag is possible or throw in the safe at the office. Ideally I would like to base it around the Silverstone Sugo SG05 HTPC Case as that would fit in my ruck sack for the motorbike ride home.

It will be used for Autocad LT / Sketchup and the usual office apps and maybe a bit of trackmania 2 when I'm bored. I have a spare AMD 5870 which I would like to use if I can but not sure if will fit the case. I need a decent CPU as well as for rendering the more threads the better although I can offload some to the server via vray's distributed rendering system but if I7 is possible then it would be nice. I also need an OS which would ideally be Win7 Professional. Need a mouse and keyboard, no need to spec a screen.

So starting with the Silverstone Sugo SG05 HTPC Case can you spec me some goodies. Budget is around £600 if possible but if slightly over then no drama.

unleashed · 27 Mar 2013 at 13:26

How about this http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-000-IN should be ok for office duties and a media device. Don't need a rucksack this will fit in the average coat pocket.

LOAM · 27 Mar 2013 at 13:54

Yeah I looked at them, there's an I5 version out in April which would be much better suited but its the graphics capabilities that worries me.

fizban1980 · 28 Mar 2013 at 17:51

I had SG05 case and its really nice, sold as I`m really looking into smaller cases.

That is healthy budget and I would take h77/z77 board, interl I5(i87 maybe), 8-16gb ram and ssd

Deleted member 77746 · 28 Mar 2013 at 18:52

What about a Mac Mini ?

crisbduck · 28 Mar 2013 at 19:39

I have an Antec 110isk with i3 3225 and gigabyte h77n.
Renders okay with vray and photoshop/autoCAD run well on it, its very small, portable and quiet. The problems are; no CD drive, graphics card and 90w psu, but that's upgradable.

Are you taking on any part 1s this summer btw?

LePhuronn · 31 Mar 2013 at 00:40

I've just finished putting a H60 into my Sugo SG05 to COMPLETELY OVERKILL on the cooling for my Pentium G850 - running passive with no issues (42 degrees max on an hour Prime run). The case fits it and airflow is wonderful.

The point, ultimately, is you don't need to skimp on CPU power when you can get a AIO water cooler in the case. And also Mini ITX boards now are very feature rich and stable for overclocking. So, whack in a 3570K on an Asrock or Asus Z77 board, drop in a AIO cooler and overclock the **** off it. 16GB RAM? Why not!

Using your existing 5870 will save on pennies, but you'll need to get the Sugo SG05-450 to get the gold-rated 450W PSU. That PSU will handle today's top-end GPUs, but I'd be more comfortable running the 450W on a 5000 series than the standard 300W.

You do need to do a bit of fiddling though to house your hard drives if you're using the AIO - I've used a dual 2.5" mount stuck underneath the PSU on mine - as accommodating the radiator means you either dump the optical drive tray and HDD cage or sacrifice longer GPUs.

Rough spec so far (how do you post shopping carts on here anyway?):

i5 3570K
Asus P8Z77-I Deluxe
Kingston HyperX Blu 16GB (2x8GB) 1600MHz
SG05-450
Corsair H60 v2

£635 before hard drives/SSDs and Windows.

If you don't want to overclock then you can save a good chunk of money getting a H77 motherboard and a non-K CPU (about £90)

LOAM · 2 Apr 2013 at 12:32

Thanks chaps, food for thought. Since starting the thread once of the guys in the office has reminded me we have a spare Win8 Pro lic that we bought and wasnt used and unbelievably a friend has a spare Crucial M225 (128gig) SSD and Dell 2407 that he is dropping off on Friday for the princely sum of a beer :O.

So looking at the following;

Silverstone Sugo SG05 HTPC Case with 450W Power Supply - 114.95
Gigabyte Z77N-WIFI Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Mini ITX Motherboard - 98.99
Intel Core i7-2700K 3.50GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 - 226.99
Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz - 99.95
Corsair Hydro H60 V2 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler - 59.99

Total 600.87

Decided on the I7 Sandy as I think its worth the extra threads for rendering over the I5 Ivy but didn't want to stretch to the I7 Ivy for what seems like not much gain (if any) over the sandy + I have an I7 Sandy atm so I know it runs everything well.

LePhuronn, any chance of a photo of your case to give some indication as to how much messing about there will be to get the Hydro in. Also can anyone confirm that the ATI5870 (gigabyte) will actually fit this case ?.