Upgrades

[DanceswithUnix]

I'm not really clear on why so many people still go with ATX these days given where ITX is, the market share does seem to be increasing though

You haven't seen the size of my Vega 56 card Once you've fitted that into a case, you might as well go at least uATX.

For me it is down to ease of cooling and having a whisper quiet workstation. That Vega card is a monster, but thanks to that can work passive most of the time as long as I have that 140mm case fan breezing gently across it.

Having said that, I look at things like the PN50 and boggle at the power you can get out of a few watts.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Where did you get the Velka from?

I bought it on Ebay a while back,but only got around properly building in it recently.

I'm not really clear on why so many people still go with ATX these days given where ITX is, the market share does seem to be increasing though

I suspect some people might need the additional expansion slots for PCI/PCI-E cards?

[wazzickle]

I have been primarily using Shuttle form factor or mini-ITX systems from 2005,and there is always some bodging involved!

Doubt any of my builds will beat the bodgiest of bodges on bending heatpipes without a tool - and still somehow managing to get it to work well - but this one involved a little heatpipe bending and general bashing, and due to a wire coming out of it's soldered socket on the power switch and my lack of access to a soldering iron i found myself googling 'is blue tack electrically conductive at one point', and now it's all done and happy so I'm happy.

Does RAM need heatspreaders? Check back in this thread to find out. (clue: almost certainly not) Without removing them on my Kingston HyperX, they were making contact with the fan, and the heat spreader on the cpu was still making more contact than would be acceptable with the side panel such that it couldn't close without bowing. So I removed the heatspreaders on the RAM (no heat needed - they're glued onto the chips and pliers do the job) and re-bodged the NH-12S and it still now makes contact with the side panel but not pushing it out. Managed to find space for a case fan too.

I also got me a Ducky Mecha Mini 60% - between that, the Ghost S1 and my monitor being arm-mounted - my desktop footprint is tiny, which feels pretty good. The only thing I'm missing for a banging setup now is a proper GPU rather than this 1070, though my RAM is now only 1866 MHz I think, not sure how much that will affect my gaming though.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Doubt any of my builds will beat the bodgiest of bodges on bending heatpipes without a tool - and still somehow managing to get it to work well - but this one involved a little heatpipe bending and general bashing, and due to a wire coming out of it's soldered socket on the power switch and my lack of access to a soldering iron i found myself googling 'is blue tack electrically conductive at one point', and now it's all done and happy so I'm happy.

Does RAM need heatspreaders? Check back in this thread to find out. (clue: almost certainly not) Without removing them on my Kingston HyperX, they were making contact with the fan, and the heat spreader on the cpu was still making more contact than would be acceptable with the side panel such that it couldn't close without bowing. So I removed the heatspreaders on the RAM (no heat needed - they're glued onto the chips and pliers do the job) and re-bodged the NH-12S and it still now makes contact with the side panel but not pushing it out. Managed to find space for a case fan too.

I also got me a Ducky Mecha Mini 60% - between that, the Ghost S1 and my monitor being arm-mounted - my desktop footprint is tiny, which feels pretty good. The only thing I'm missing for a banging setup now is a proper GPU rather than this 1070, though my RAM is now only 1866 MHz I think, not sure how much that will affect my gaming though.

It does make me wonder when they design these cases,the designers can't add a few more mm to the CPU cooler clearance.