Spec me a case...

xs2man

xs2man

xs2man

Soldato
Joined
21 Jul 2008
Posts
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So I'm doing a bit of a shift around of gear, and building a new PC. But I need to re-case my old system. It'll be a ATX sized board (Gigabyte GA-H87-HD3, I would consider changing this to a smaller size if it will help, but I'm really trying to reduce the cost of components as much as possible). It'll also be running a Corsair H60v2 AIO (currently push/pull configured), but I suspect most cases will be fine with that. I was considering a move up to a 240mm AIO though, so the ability to house that would be great.

Beyond that, it'll have 1 2.5" SSD, and up to 4x 3.5" HDD's. I will have no need for optical drives, so no need for the 5.25". I "may" need room for a NIC card. No GPU or Sound cards or anything like that.

That's pretty much it. It'll be used as a small, home server like device. So won't need a terribly large PSU in there. I'll be aiming for a modular / semi-modular PSU to reduce cables too.

I would like it to be as small as possible. I used to have a Qnap TS453A in the space where this will sit, but I doubt I'll get anything that small due to the motherboard.

Budget around the £60 mark ideally. Is there anything out there for such requirements? Most of the midi-tower designs I see only hold 2x 3.5" HDD's unfortunately. I am willing to go for a cube shape if something suitable shows up.
 
Thanks.

Mid Tower shape is fine. I was just hoping to avoid the slightly bigger full tower, else I'd be as well just launching my NZXT Phantom 530 up there. Something I might just do anyway, and just build the daily machine smaller with maybe a micro-ATX build.
 
Oh man you've got plenty of options then. You just need 4 drive bays and either a dedicated ssd mount somewhere like behind the mobo tray, or 5 drive bays. Failing that you could just tuck the SSD in the 5.25in Bay area
 
Thanks for that. Looks good. Weedy 80mm rear fan though, lol. I'll have a closer look at it to see where I could mount my radiator from my Corsair H60v2.
 
xs2man said:
Thanks for that. Looks good. Weedy 80mm rear fan though, lol. I'll have a closer look at it to see where I could mount my radiator from my Corsair H60v2.
Click to expand...

If it's just for home server use you could just bung a cheap air cooler on it. Make better use of the AIO or even sell it
 
True. Whilst it is for a "home server", the idea is for the home server to do the bulk of the video encoding with handbrake. Else the i7 would be wasted here.

So I rip the BD with the new PC (using the optical out of this one, so no optical required on the new case). Do all my encode settings tests on the "new build". Then send it to the "server", once settings have been finalized, and do the main encode on that machine. Allowing me to turn off the daily driver.

So I expect my server to max out all 8 cores pretty frequently. And for at least a couple hours at a time (potentially more if I can queue up some encodes overnight). I'm basically re-casing my current rig, with a similar useage profile, only without the day-to-day running aspect. The AIO, while not a spectacular unit, still keeps the temps at around 50 deg at 100%, after 1 hour of 100% CPU usage (not OC'd due to the current MB). So not bad.

My new build, I am hoping, will be one of the new Zen CPU's (I'm hoping for 4c/8t Zen for similar prices to current i5 models, but we'll see), so the H60 is probably not AM4 compatible. So unlikely to be able to swap it to that build. And it wont be worth, second hand, as much as a decent air cooler anyway. That rig will most likely go air cooled anyway, but would like to retain the option of at least a 240mm rad just in case of use profile changes further down the line.
 
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