Would recommend the FormD T1 for this form factor. I think it has better compatibility & thermal design than this one, but not sure
https://formdworks.com / https://www.reddit.com/r/FormD/
I have the old T1 v1.1 (slightly smaller at 9.5L) - my current build has a 4090 FE & 5800X3D in it, all air cooled with excellent temps.
There's a particular YouTuber who does a lot of reviewing of SFF cases: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTwie1pxuro
Nice! It's sad that the machine they liked so much in 2020 is already obsolete:
2020-03-06: Hopefully, this machine will do for an other 20 years. Come back and check in 2040. -- https://fabiensanglard.net/the_beautiful_machine/
Agreed this is sad. My plan was:
- Do programming, articles/books writing, and web browsing on the DB4.
- Game on the macbook pro (Mostly Blizzard games such as Starcraft and WoW).
This plan crashed when Blizzard stopped releasing its games on mac. D2R did not get the treatment and D4 won't get it either.
If you are ever annoyed by the noise, you can build a silent gaming rig with a mosterlabo case, needs more space though.
Not affiliated, just a fan.
Worth mentioning that a very slow fan (at 600-800 rpm) is essentially silent. If it only spins up a little when you game you probably won't hear it from the sounds on the game.
You can outfit their cases with those and enjoy Cyberpunk in 4K with Ray Tracing on a RTX3080 with 50 min FPS!
While his machine is no longer current, the dream of the fanless computer lives on very strong. The Macbook Air no longer has a fan and is a tiny little machine with strength to spare and passive cooling.
The Air doesn't work well at peak loads for extended periods of time. The use case is very different for gaming.
I do not think it is obsolete, just that his original design was inappropriate for his needs. The power supply + GPU are still more than adequate for any task that is not gaming or video rendering.
A ten year old processor can do most anything you need.
Along the same line and even smaller is the DAN A4-SFX, just 7.2L internally.
After 10 years, I recently built myself a new 'desktop' and used one of these and it truly is a 'desktop' now and sits in the corner of my desk as opposed to under it like my old tower. https://www.dan-cases.com/dana4.php
Dan's new C4-SFX case officially hit production today too, for anyone wanting to build an SFF that is future proof for tomorrow's giga-sized GPUs.
See also here for an example build: https://blog.codinghorror.com/building-a-pc-part-ix-downsizi...
Out of all the SFF cases I’ve looked at that are compatible with high-end GPUs, this one is the smallest while still remaining practical. I’ve been using mine with a slightly undervolted 3080 FE for the last 2 years, and while it runs a bit hot, it’s been otherwise a near-perfect little gaming machine.
I'm in a DAN A4 (still using 1080 FE), but it seems like 40XX generation cards will never fit. Cards got so big they're almost the same size as the whole case!
“In comparison to the RTX 3080 FE, the 4080 FE is 20mm longer, 25mm wider and a whopping 23mm thicker”
Oof, yeah, the 3080 FE just barely fits.
The site is down, archive.org to the rescue:
https://web.archive.org/web/20230125120035/https://fabiensan...
As long as Azure isn't down.
It's Microsoft, I'm sure it will never go down!
*oh*
I have a Intel ECE and RTX 3060 in almost the same case as this one. The ECE is a mobo and intel processor in a GPU form factor[1]. It's quite small, but can tend to run hot and demand lots of fans.
Luckily Intel has a tuning utility which is really useful, and I slightly under volt to run much cooler and quieter.
For SFF, I can enthusiastically recommend the Intel ECE line.
1. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/boards...
I reproduced the parts list in PCPartPicker, including some manually entered price data: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/irskep/saved/x8Jxf7
Comes out to about $2K USD. Just in case anyone's looking to do a similar build.
I can never tell what I'm supposed to be optimizing personal PC workstations for. And at this point I'm too embarrased to ask.
I like the ideas, in the abstract, of optimizing for extreme silence (zero moving parts in OP's previous DB4 build), or extreme compactness (like this oddity), and so forth. I'm sure they're all terribly wrong choices for me personally, but I'm glad other people are exploring them, that the solution space is well characterized.
> what I'm supposed to
Pretty much it's personal. Either what you need for work or play, or what you want or some reasonable mix of those.
Personally, I like overkill and tranquility (and value). I'm not 100% there, but I'm close, because I have a powerful (but not maximum performance) machine that produces a little noise (but nothing grating.)
Someone that loves silence wouldn't like the slight hum, and someone that wants maximum quality 4K gaming or machine-learning wouldn't love the 10% performance I left on the table to save (quite) a few bucks (while reducing power and cooling requirements some.)
The truth is that you're much better off with an interior solution (taking a tradeoff between future expandability, budget, etc.) than a corner solution like extreme compactness
Nvidia Founder's Ed. cards don't go well with sandwich style cases. The space behind the card heats as you use the pc and in turn causes the motherboard, cpu and other components to heat.
If you're looking for a sff case for Founders Ed cards, I would recommend "Sliger Console". It's almost made for this type of cooling.
I have an SFFPC myself, but I fear their days are numbered with the ridiculous sizes of GPUs these days. Sure, a 3060 fits in this, but that’s hardly a cutting edge card.
I had to bend my Ncase M1 to fit my 3070 on top of deshrouding it. The fact that the FEs (and some Zotac two fans) are the only smaller sized versions of these cards makes me think the primary Nvidia partners like aren’t terribly interested in making the cards smaller because they fit fine in ATX cases.
I hope I’m proven wrong with the 5000 series GPUs. I’d hate to have to upsize just to play current games.
I have a Mjolnir and was able to fit a 3090 inside without any modifications to it, except for taking off a small, removable piece of plastic that was only there for aesthetics. The only issue is that the side panel does something weird to the airflow that makes the GPU fans really noisy, so I usually just keep that panel removed.
In the first place, SFFPCs were always designed to fit desktop-sized parts in the smallest possible form factor. If the job of the designer is to maintain that trend, then even if GPUs get bigger, we'll see SFFPC cases appear that can fit those GPUs, for those who really want maximum performance. Still, I'd bet that the 3060 (soon 4060?) is the most popular GPU to find inside SFFPCs today.
I wish activision blizzard still made mac versions of their games. Diablo 2 resurrected would probably run smooth as butter and be dead silent on an m2 mac mini.
Whats even worse - they do make it for Switch, which is ARM based. A lot of the leg work has already been completed.
> A lot of the leg work
You mean arm work? ;)
I could be wrong, but I think that a bigger hurdle than Apple Silicon itself is the Metal API, which seems to be the only reasonable graphics API to use for 3D games on Mac. Unless your game is also hitting iPad (Divinity: Original Sin 2) or you're entering some kind of partnership with Apple (Resident Evil Village, I'm speculating?), it's probably a big ask to either train your staff or hire devs to maintain a separate render pipeline to satisfy a relatively tiny market share.
As a Mac user, I'd love to be proven wrong, and I hope that Apple's PR with Capcom is a sign that they're going to start putting more money into bolstering the Mac gaming landscape. IMO, this seems like a "throw money at it" kind of problem where Apple needs to make it financially viable to port games to their platform if we want to see it done for big titles.
+200. I wonder what motivated this decision. Too little sales for too much investment?
That is a very pretty small PC case!
Talking about small cases, what's the smallest case anyone has gotten away with housing 2x RTX 3090 with adequate cooling?
I'm in the same boat. I have dual 3090s for gaming and AI, though I rarely ever utilize it for either anymore.
I originally tried to stick them both in my pretty large case from BuildRedux, but it would overheat and shut off, so I just bought a mining "case" - basically flat steel bars rivetted together. It can supposedly hold 8 GPUs, but I only have my 2 3090s on it and even then, when they are both working on something, it kicks off a LOT of heat, but with a fan blowing on it, the GPUs never reach critical temperatures.
Last winter, I had it in stored in my AC return closet, and used it for crypto heating, and my AC/Heat was just set to circulate. Kept our apartment at around 70F even when it was in the 30s and 40s outside.
With a custom loop liquid cooling setup, very very small. I'd think a case <12L, certainly <15L
That would be amazing indeed. I have never dabbled with liquid cooling, this seems like a good reason to investigate.
Ha, classic PC gamer hobby. Spending over $1000 in hardware and hours in building it jut to play Diablo 2. I love it.
Not the hammer. Small computer case.
It should easily be possible to add a handle to it though. Could be either 3d printed or even hand carved from a big stick or something. Maybe it should be possible to route much of the cabling through the handle as well? Hmmmm.
I wouldn't trust any 3d printed filament for any serious hammering tasks. Assuming you have the strength to heft it, I'd go with thick old-growth oak screwed directly into the motherboard. A steel handle might offer better heat dissipation but falls down on aesthetic and battle-comfort grounds.
Hear hear! But be sure to avoid overly mossy handles as the oils built up over the years lower the heat dissipation capable via the handle and is a better electric conductor -- not a good thing if you are wanting to channel lightning at places other than yourself.
I'd also want some serious external cable management. Serious hammering is not going to be possible with power and monitor cable flailing around.
Buy a hickory axe handle, cut off the tenon and put in a threaded insert. Then you'd only need to drill a small hole in the top of the case to thread a bolt through to hold it on. If you want to be fancy, get a wood burning kit and burn some runes into it or something.
Disappointed to find there is no photo showing the inside of the case with the CPU cooler and cabling.
For photos, you can check out the r/sffpc. In general, the SFF cabling depends on the amount of effort the builder's willing to take. In a similarly sized and laid out Geeek A50+, my cabling is a total mess.
The videos linked also feature footage of the inside before closing it.
Exterior aesthetic gives me Arris/Motorola Surfboard cable internet vibes.
Which, in my opinion, isn't too bad for a cold and wholly inorganic thing meant to harness electricity for Diablos.
I'm not sure that I've ever seen a beautiful PC. Technology in general is ugly. We do everything we can to hide its shameful guts.
If you look at the most upvoted pictures on /r/battlestations, they're typically small desk jungle-scapes that are appealing in spite of, rather than because of, the box.
Coincidentally, my barely-powerful-enough home server is called schinken, German for ham, which is fitting since it's half a hammer.
In my previous life, I built a SFFPC that packed workstation-level punch into a carry-on sized case. Then had a set of monitors+keyboard+mouse at each location I worked at.
I was really sceptical when I built it, but it worked beautifully for 7 years. Used a SG13 case as the foundation. The only downside was intense interest from TSA agents
Anecdotally, I've found that TSA interest has decreased over time. I built a DAN A4 with an AIO cooler in 2019 and have flown over 10 times with it. My last 3 flights, I didn't get stopped at all.
LTT had a stream building a computer using this case too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Il556YxkdhA&t=1400s&ab_chann...
I realized the problem with this format is that it will always be more expensive since desktop/gaming computer parts are never designed to be smaller. The main reason being cooling.
Although there might be a lot of headroom to use gaming laptop parts.
Honestly I'm not really ready to pay 50% more for a gaming setup with the same performance, especially since it will still be difficult and expensive to upgrade.
So there's no good solution other than finding enough room for that gaming desktop.
Personally I use a cheap durable laptop (thinkpad L series) for everything I do that doesn't require performance. I'm saving electricity and money.
Fabien if you are reading this. What keyboard is that? It looks like you have removable switches given the gap, but the key caps also look quite thin making the gap more pronounced. Curious what you got going there.
It is a Blackwidow Lite with the dust cover that came with it.
I think it's missing the top half of the case, which is why the gap is so pronounced
Very cool looking sff case https://thor-zone.com/mini-itx/
The case is way too expensive for what it offers and there are much better alternatives out there (e.g. Formd T1 that someone linked above).
I was ready to buy mjolnir few years ago, but while they couldn't decide on basic details (at the time it wasn't clear if the outer shell would be 1 piece of aluminum or multiple) and the competition seems to have delivered a much better range of products.
I have one. Beautiful. But bought a GPU that doesn't fit because the cabling of the GPU is just a bit too much. Stick with the GPUs Thor recommends.
I always find it weird when people use the name "Mjolnir" for their products. In mythology it is a botched product. The reason why it looks like a sledge hammer with a short handle, is because it is. In the myth Loki pulled shenanigans while it was being forged so now Thor can't use the handle for leverage to give a full power blow with it.
Au contraire, it's the most successful of products, an innovation that comes from a purported flaw. Due to distraction while it was made its handle is so short it can only be wielded by one hand, which is all Thor needs to deliver his "mightiest blows." The implication is that Thor's two handed swings would break any weapon.
It's kind of the opposite of Maui's hook. Hawaiian myths attest that Maui was an average fisherman in terms of skill, and his great fishing feats -- pulling up islands and such -- were exclusively due to the hook.
Personality-wise, Dwayne Johnson's depiction of Maui in Moana is pretty spot on: in many Polynesian cultures he is revered as a great hero and seen as an egotistical douchebag who overestimates his own awesomeness. (The Māori story of Maui and the goddess of death, which may have inspired the bit from Moana about his taking the Heart of Te Fiti, is one of my favorites.)
In mythology pretty much everyone and everything is flawed. Gods tend to just be really powerful jerks to a large extent.
But that may be the very point of the name -- it's a small package, but very powerful.
One thing that struck me while reading The Iliad as an adult was how the gods' personalities and actions seemed to make the story more believable. What do I mean you ask? Well, they embodied many of the arbitrary and difficult-to-discern movements we encounter in life. Forces beyond our control and often beyond our cognition. By "believable" I don't mean "this is what happened" but rather "this accurately depicts the experience of life".
Yes. When I was a child and read Norse and Greek mythology I always thought about gods as "this is the god of love", "this is the god of thunder" etc. As an adult coming back to those myths I realised that the gods are given facets of human personality and are actually a lens through which to understand our own flaws and traits.
Excellent points. And for the person who said they never heard anyone describe God as jealous:
> for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God [Exodus 20:5]
God describes himself as jealous!
I wish this weren't buried in a small form factor computer build thread, as you deserve a better response...
I am an occultist and a witch. I don't particularly work with many Gods, but I do work with 2 (Brigid and Loki). Others have worked with and against me at times.
First, there are a LOT of these types of beings. The Caananite Sky deity, later known as YHVH, is only one such. However, He was able to place Himself as the seat of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
> if god is flawless / perfectly just / infallible / all-loving etc
Simply put: they aren't. Even they do have limits. Those limits are a lot different than what we'd normally think of as limits. The reason why the Abramanic religions view their deity as that is primarily propaganda - the believers couldn't come to terms that they were fallible.
> then why is he ascribed with so many human flaws
It's my belief that they were human as well, and figured out the secret of ascension.
> (bible quotes)
The quotes you used are primarily the Christian names. The Torah version of those are nowhere near as clear as you indicate. In ancient Hebrew, no vowels were written down. It was the job of the head Rabbi to *interpret*.. divine, if you will, the hidden vowels and do a divination of the words in the Torah. And due to this, the meanings of the verses you quote change as times change. You can see this if you compare an Etz Hayim from decades apart. A stark notable change in readings happened just after WWII.
> why does he even care how one lives their life
That's complicated. Many of us in the occult not only believe in reincarnation, but also that each of us are pieces that are combined to make "me". And between death and life, those pieces can be jumbled around.
I've been able to access my past and some of my future lives. From someone who is timeless (think: deity), they're looking at the big picture, across all your lives. That path leads somewhere, and those decisions in each life matter to that course. Again, we're usually too narrow focused to see that, and most are also without the techniques to discern futures and past/future lives.
Some of us have larger plans. others, not so much. But usually those "plans" also have larger responsibility, and a lot of hardship. I just happen to be on a different path than most on this earth. It doesn't make me any more or less special than the rest of you.
Never heard anyone describe The Father as those things, maybe Christ. Ive heard God being all good but that is because of per definition of good.
If you want to see something weird, try Celtic mythology.
You have interesting characters like Math fab Mathonwy, who somehow must rest his feet in the lap of a virgin unless he was at war, or he will die. Or Cú Chulainn, who was amazingly badass to the point that he had to be stopped by mass female toplessness.
I haven't the faintest clue what those are supposed to symbolize or represent, but it's sure interesting.
I think of it a bit like "Wheel of Fortune". The stories of the gods are made to make the listener seem clever.
they also spell it wrong, since there's a missing umlaut over the o, so Mjoelnir at least or Mjölnir or equivalently Mjølnir, and it kinda drives me and my grammatical obsession nuts, like "would of" instead of "would have".
When most people these days think of Mjölnir, they think of Marvel Thor's cinder block on a stick (which this case sort of resembles).
I still think of Master Chief's power armor
[dead]
Man, that cable routing looks fiendish.
We could really do with a form factor that lets case manufacturers route this stuff internally for you, but getting the manufacturers to agree on a format & support it is probably not feasible sadly.
The NZXT H1 does exactly that :) virtually all the cables are prerouted
The best GPU I could fit in (and cool down), a 1050 Ti, barely managed to run Diablo 2 Resurrected.
He could've gotten better gaming performance by using any AMD APU with a 680m iGPU.
Do you have benchmarks to backup this claim?
AKA Jonathan
Shoutout to you for this Apple deep cut! https://www.storiesofapple.net/the-jonathan-computer.html
Too bad Apple's management was so timid. That could have changed the course of computing back in 1985. I had a Macintosh IIx and it was a great computer but I would have bought the Jonathon in a heartbeat back then. Thanks for the history, first I've heard of it.
Sure! A bit more detail in this thread: https://twitter.com/bensyverson/status/1494532671623544840
You can always go with a VPX system if you want something like that, but obviously that's not cheap at all.
I want to see an overall build price!
Ah, for a moment, I thought this was about the [Mjölnir project](https://github.com/matrix-org/mjolnir/) in Matrix-land.
500 ISE
All that to play a 20 year old game. Maybe I'm being thick and that's the joke?
Anyway, the vertical mount of the video card got me wondering again about how reasonable that is. I read something about vapor chambers being designed for the video card to be placed horizontally. The theory being that there is a heat > rise > cool/condense > gravity thing that happens inside these heat sinks that gets disrupted if the heatsink is on it's side making the cooling less effective.
I'm curious if anyone has more evidence about this.
If I'm not mistaken, Diablo 2 Resurrected is not a 20 year old game, since it is a remaster of the original Diablo 2. It has been released ~two years ago.(21/08/2021)
> All that to play a 20 year old game. Maybe I'm being thick and that's the joke?
It's the remaster, not the original.
I suspect Fabien also wants the option to play more recent ones than Diablo 2, otherwise he'd probably spring for a cheaper GPU than a Geforce 3060 Ti Founders Edition (which isn't expensive but it's not exactly bargain bucket)
With that setup, you can pretty much play almost all modern games too. I just built a very similar setup using the Lian Li A4 H20 and works just fine.
Its not practical, but neither is building some weird car that does something cool but cant use actual roads
Just finished moving my rig to the T1 this week. It's a very impressive case.
The Mjolnir was what I'd been after for a while but I think the T1 was a better choice for me due to the flexibility it offers.
Love the "3D Print Files" for $999,999 :-). Interesting way to add downloadable content into your shop.
Currently running a T1 with a 5800X and a 3070 and loving it too, it really is a great little case.
My T1 package has been sitting on the shelf for months, will wait until the 7000 X3D models are available. I do hope the AM5 ITX mainboards will come down in price, the cheapest there is still costs 250€.
I guess you'll need to be using an AIO for that? I previously had an AIO with the 5900X, but needed to switch to air cooling to allow for enough exhaust to keep the 4090 happy
Although the 5800X3D technically has the same TDP, it seems that it pulls a lot less power for typical use, and is doing nicely with the Alpenföhn Black Ridge
Corsair 4000D with 2 exhaust fans, Corsair 360mm AIO for my 5900X (34° C idle, 42+ with any use).
Radeon RX 6700 XT stays happy enough at 48-50°C idle and of course warmer during games.
How hot was the 4090 getting?
I didn't test it with the AIO in place, but with two Phanteks T30 fans as exhaust instead.
In that config under GPU benchmarking for ~10 mins, the 4090 runs at about 70°C for the GPU and 80°C for the VRAM
I haven't decided yet, if I can get away with air cooling the CPU that would be nice, but I'm not opposed to AIO. I won't run a 4090 in there.
When I was looking into ITX builds, that was what gave me pause. A true premium price vs what you can get with uATX. Significantly bigger footprint, but I do not feel like I am paying for glamour.
Yeah, I think micro ATX is a great format. You can fit anything in a very cheap case, mobos are economical, and air cooling works.
Those extra small itx builds are interesting when you need power and some degree of portability for some reason, but a laptop doesn’t cut it (eg too noisy).
One thing I did find interesting though is that (well designed) sandwich ITX cases typically seem to have far better thermal behaviour than regular cases. No big cavity for heat to accumulate
Yeah, I think it's the same idea as driving a sports car- the aesthetic and performance is without a doubt better, but it's rarely the pragmatic choice.
Are there any solutions for a power button on the front of the machine?
As far as I'm aware, the only thing you can do on the front is add a USB-C port (and only on the T1 v2)
I was just looking at this case again, and apparently the T1 V2 does have a front power button, so excellent.