[SPEC ADVICE] Going off grid

Curve · 23 Feb 2016 at 19:15

I'm trying to find the most painless way to scale down my power hungry rig.

I would like to move to a smaller case so I guess I'm looking at a M-ATX rig.

My current specs are:

Mobo: Gigabyte GA-Z77X-UD5H
CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K @ 4.5GHz
GPU: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4096MB GDDR5
RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600Mhz
HDD1: Intel 180GB 330 Series SSD
HDD2: Seagate 3TB BARRACUDA

I guess I'm looking at swapping out the mobo, the cpu cooler but my GPU seems too big to fit in a m-atx case.

For what its worth I'm looking at moving into a van for 6 months of the year

joeyjojo · 23 Feb 2016 at 19:40

What's the question?

For size, obviously smaller case is smaller.

For "power hungry", all you can do is reduce the clocks/volts, or get lower-power parts. Putting the CPU back to stock would take something like 65 W off. Even more if you undervolt it. A gold/platinum PSU would help. Other than that not much you can do but get a skylake i3.

adrichardson81 · 23 Feb 2016 at 19:43

If you've got the budget, a Fury Nano would be perfect for an M-ATX/ITX build. A BitFenix
Prodigy M should be able to take your 970 though...

Telecaster · 24 Feb 2016 at 22:11

There's loads of tiny MITX cases that will fit full sized GPUs, those prodigy abortions are almost the size of a proper PC case, I've no idea how they sold so many on the back of being small form factor.

Get yourself over to the SFF section of [H] , there's loads of ideas and set ups to get inspiration from over there.

Idleman · 25 Feb 2016 at 11:50

There are smaller cases you can get, that will take an ATX and your Gpu.

http://www.cooltek.de/en/jonsbo-powered-by-cooltek/w-series/131/w2

Avalon · 25 Feb 2016 at 17:03

Curve said:
For what its worth I'm looking at moving into a van for 6 months of the year

Define Use, van and if portability or size is the driver.

Initial ideas are laptop (battery+portable+minimal space used/easy to put away) or NUC (sub 20w+ screen - dual purpose monitor/TV?).