Very close to moving the main rig to SFF

[Platinum]

Main thing that made me think this was that after upgrading my Lan / Media / Folding box to a i7 2600 I realised its faster than my i7 920 clocked at 3.4GHz (will go higher but uses silly power and puts out to much heat).

So planning to flog most of my rig bar the SSD and use the Lan / Media PC as my main rig and build a AMD based SFF in the future.

Current spec is :

Silverstone SG05 Chassis
Intel Core i7 2600 CPU
Asus H61 ITX mobo (cant remember the model)
4gb memory (ill stick in 8gb when I swap it over, may as well given current prices)

The CPU is not the K CPU but it does turbo up to 3.5GHz on all cores under load so its fine for now and I plan to replace it with a Ivy Bridge chip next year anyhow.

The main thing that was holding me back was audio, I hate onboard sound and I am currently using a Xonar Essence ST.
However Creative labs have what looks to be a ideal USB sound card out very soon so thinking of getting one of those, problem solved.

Graphics is the main question I have for the Hexus gurus, Currently running a GTX 580 and it runs everything maxed out even Crysis, My original thoughts were to replace it with a Radeon 7xxx when released as rumours are they are faster / lower power / shorter PCB's, but it now looks like they have been pushed back to next year, so thinking of going with a 6870 in the mean time and waiting, From what I read it should be fine for 1900 x 1200 gaming, anyone run this card at that res?

Really want to reduce the amount of power / heat used by my PC and also want to build a small but powerful rig
Considered the SG07 but I prefer the SG05 and I am sure that a powerful SFF machine can be built using a 450 watt PSU.

Thoughts?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The H61 does not support ACHI AFAIK. The HD6950 1GB is starting to drop in price though:

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/asus...yotech-1030060

However,the Asus has a triple slot cooler.

Anyway, I recently did a mini-ITX build too:

http://forums.hexus.net/motherboards...x-rebuild.html

[Platinum]

Pretty sure it does support AHCI, iirc there was a option to enable it in the EFI anyhow?
6950 doesn't fit that case, 6870 seems to be the longest it can take

[shaithis]

i7 + high end gfx on 450w PSU? Your only chance (IMO) is wait for the next gen cards....then you may get 6870 performance on a 450w psu....maybe.

In terms of price/performance in that area......seems the 560 Ti cards are starting to become the best bang-for-buck and they only use about 10w more than a 6950 2gb.

Your going to have to look at different PSUs I would suspect. Going from a 580 to "something that will work reliably on a 450w PSU" could be a real killjoy.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The 500W Shuttle PSU I have in my current system can run a Core i7 980X and a GTX580:

http://www.shuttle.eu/news/view/nvid...d7a79b4d96/29/

The HD6950 1GB can also be had for around £150 and unless the GTX560TI is pre-overclocked to around 880MHZ to 900MHZ will be a tad slower. The Asus HD6950 1GB has a great cooler although it is a big card.

Anyway,for an SFF rig I would be looking at a cooler with a blower type fan if possible.

[Platinum]

i7 + high end gfx on 450w PSU? Your only chance (IMO) is wait for the next gen cards....then you may get 6870 performance on a 450w psu....maybe.

In terms of price/performance in that area......seems the 560 Ti cards are starting to become the best bang-for-buck and they only use about 10w more than a 6950 2gb.

Your going to have to look at different PSUs I would suspect. Going from a 580 to "something that will work reliably on a 450w PSU" could be a real killjoy.

Nah its fine mate, the machine running with a SSD and a Mechanical drive, motherboard, CPU and 4gb ram atm under full load only pulls 100 watts, the 6870 1gb stock model is rated for 151 Watts, thats 251 watts, hardly going to push a 450 watt PSU.
Even taking all the hardware at there rated wattages its not going to push the PSU :

CPU 95 watts
Motherboard what 25 watts?
SSD : 4 watts?
Mechanical drive : 10 watts?
Optical drive : 10 watts?
Graphics card 151Ws?
Memory 10 watts?

Even taking in the efficiency of the Power supplys its not going to stress it.

I am at a loss to understand why people have this notion that for a standard PC you need more than 500 watts of power?

[shaithis]

We should point out that no guarantee of reliable long-term operation can be given as a great many factors could influence the test results described here

Sounds like it works to begin with at least....

[shaithis]

I am at a loss to understand why people have this notion that for a standard PC you need more than 500 watts of power?

I don't class the most powerful single GPU on the planet as part of a "standard pc".

It's a high-end gaming rig.

[Platinum]

Very few single GPU setups require more than 500 watts, why does everyone keep saying you need it when you mention a moderately powerful GPU?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Nah its fine mate, the machine running with a SSD and a Mechanical drive, motherboard, CPU and 4gb ram atm under full load only pulls 100 watts, the 6870 1gb stock model is rated for 151 Watts, thats 251 watts, hardly going to push a 450 watt PSU.
Even taking all the hardware at there rated wattages its not going to push the PSU :

CPU 95 watts
Motherboard what 25 watts?
SSD : 4 watts?
Mechanical drive : 10 watts?
Optical drive : 10 watts?
Graphics card 151Ws?
Memory 10 watts?

Even taking in the efficiency of the Power supplys its not going to stress it.

I am at a loss to understand why people have this notion that for a standard PC you need more than 500 watts of power?

My old Shuttle SD37P2 has a 450W SFF PSU too which is not even 80+ rated.

The Q6600 in it has a high VID but I still ran it overclocked at around 3GHZ,with an HD5850 1GB overclocked to between 850MHZ to 950MHZ,a 975X motherboard which can do Crossfire(not a very energy efficient chipset either),4GB of DDR2,2 SATA hard drives,an IDE optical drive and a card reader.

The SFF PSU in the SG05 is not the best 450W PSU in the world but IMHO should be fine with a Core i7 and an HD6870 1GB.