Small Form Factor Thread for the thin mini ITX builds

An unexpected bill has come up gents so I'm forced to sell the build I just did, thread is in the marketplace if anyone is interested in it, I'm only after £120 for it - what I paid for it parts wise.

 

That’s a bargain. Shame it won’t fit what I need inside or I’d take it.

 

Sad news, sorry to hear that mate. Bloomin' bills, a horrible time of year for all that.
Looks a great rig, someone's in for a treat.

 

The ITX board fired up as soon as I put in a CPU and some memory. Winner winner, chicken dinner!

https://imgur.com/gallery/elY6V

 

Your latest haul is all looking good TMDD
I think you needed a larger CPU cooler though...

 

Oh jeez, you really do not want to see behind the camera. It’s a friggin’ mess.

Here’s why the board is sitting so high off of my desk (which is changing soon as well) ... it’s one of every single Chromax part they offer.

https://imgur.com/gallery/V1teB

I have a cooler for it that’s more HTPC suitable, which is also from Noctua... they seem to love me in the States.

 

Plenty of room for cable management though!

 

Sod that fill it with rads, reservoirs and god knows what else

 

You certainly qualify for an entry on the smallformfactor.net space-inefficiency-thread!

That'll be a LOT of watercooling kit and HUGE PSU needed to try to fill that beastie

 

It seems that not all is well with that ITX board. It keeps blue screening with two sticks of memory, though I’m unable to narrow it down to the memory or the board just yet.

I’ve now got the NTFS File System Error every attempted boot. So time for a reinstall and to find a smaller CPU cooler than this Noctua one that’s on there. It’s too big anyway as it overhangs the PCI-E slot.

 

And after hours of messing around, even resorting to trying another board... it turns out that the memory I was using has some weird compatibility issue with this system. ****!!

Thank goodness for having various DDR3 kits laying around. Haha!

Edit:

I figured I’d try some of the original memory once again to see if it works, purely out of curiosity... and it damned well does. Phew. Now I don’t need to use my high-end memory for a DVR.

So weird....

 

Good stuff, nice to see you over on SFFN

That's a relief, something got straightened out in the process.

 

It was the weirdest thing, though. It wasn’t even able to install Windows without crashing about 7-12% into the copying of files. I used really high-end PSC based memory, though running at 1333, just like the other sticks that were Elpida Hyper and some other Micron junk, and it worked flawlessly. So I swapped back to the Micron sticks (XMS3) and when it would previously fall over in less than 15 seconds, it now ran for 20 minutes without flaw.

The second extremely strange thing, which lead me to believe the board or CPU was bad, and given that the board was in a job lot of “faulty” boards, that was my thought. It was dropping memory a memory channel and somehow only detecting 1GB instead of 4GB, even though they were 2GB sticks. It blows my mind how it sorted itself out... but hey ho. That’s the way of PCs.

 

I finally got around to swapping out my rust spinner with an SSD earlier - god I've missed having an SSD...!

It was surprisingly easy to do (caveat: I'm running Ubuntu, not Windows). I just used a GParted live USB to copy the partitions from the original drive in a USB3 enclosure to the SATA-connected SSD (after first shrinking the partition size to ensure partitions from a 320GB HDD would fit on a 128GB SSD). I tried that a few weeks ago and had all sorts of errors when I tried to boot the system; I thought I was going to have to muck around re-installing GRUB using an Ubuntu live USB, so I've been putting it off for a while... I think the key step was making sure I'm using the same partition table types on both disks: I didn't do that last time, so I must have tried to copy partitions from a disk using GPT to a disk using MBR - no wonder the bootloader had a hissy fit... This time GRUB didn't whine at all, it just booted straight back into my OS. I really didn't want to have to re-install GRUB: Ubuntu tries to use the LVDS connector as the primary display and the only way to stop permanently it is to edit the GRUB parameters. It's not fun trying to login when the login window is being rendered on a display that doesn't exist!

I'd still much rather use an mSATA SSD than a 2.5" drive but any SSD is better than a clapped-out old rust spinner!

 

Just put my OSMI up on the MP. Im not going to use it any time soon.

One a side note on these thin boards we bought, I dont appear to have any 19V PSU's all the ones I have are 19.5V Do we think that would be ok?

 

It’ll be fine, yeah. It’s within the 5% tolerance range.

 

Finally got to putting together the bits for this build. I had a 1u itx case sitting around (you know as you do....) so put it together quickly in there to fire it up.

So far I have the:

The silverstone cooler I mentioned above
8GB RAM DDR3L SO-DIMM 1600
Intel i5-4590T
256Gb Samsung SM841 mSata
Dell 19.5V / 4.62A PSU

The PSU connector feels longer than it should but works fine.

System booted up easily without any issues.

 

For anyone that might run a similar setup to me in the future with the FM2 CPU, then, for the love of those sacred things... turn off channel rank interleaving. That was the broken part of the system all along.