Small Form Factor Thread for the thin mini ITX builds

It's all good thanks . I returned the M.2 SSD to CeX earlier; Ubuntu is running great with a spinning rust drive, and I've got my eye on a few mSATA SSDs on eBay..

That's exactly the one I'm about to return. It's a nice little case, but I couldn't fit the cooler in. The Silverstone AR04 cooler I had needs to be mounted in one of two orientations in order to ensure that the heat pipes don't foul components on the board (seems to be a common issue with this cooler); unfortunately both of those orientations mean that the fins of the heatsink would not fit into the cutouts in the bottom case panel. Little chance of modding it, because it was a thin plastic wall.

If your cooler is smaller than the AR04 then you should be OK.

 

http://silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=442&area=en

I have one of the above

 

It should be OK, but obviously I can't guarantee that. The fins on the AR04 I have extend out past the push-pins, and I think that's what was causing the problem - the case is boxed up and ready to send back, so can't really check. That case is available on Amazon, so it might be worth getting it from their for ease of return - when I bought it it was "sold by and despatched from" Amazon, so not a third-party seller.

 

off topic a little, but why of why does nice temping stuff come out?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phanteks-p...ncoding=UTF8&refRID=1YKA39355BTE64M2QW8W&th=1

That and Parge throwing up a nice AM4 ITX bundle!

 

I'm a big fan of this thread. Well, a big fanless of this thread...

T-class Intel CPUs were a bit of a problem for me back along too - since clearing out a lot of stuff the only T-class CPU I have is a 6700T in an Asus H170T board, 16Gb DDR4 (back when it wasn't horrifyingly expensive), a Samsung 960 EVO 250Gb, and an Intel wireless card, the model of which presently escapes me. It's all sitting silently in an Akasa Euler, it's running Ubuntu, and it's for tinkering purposes. It's so capable, I'm thinking I might just make it my day-to-day machine.

I'd throw up a picture, but it's basically a black aluminium box!

 

Eulers are the kings of thin itx cases. Just sold my last one.

 

I've had three over the years, and I'd not use anything else. Champion bits of kit!

 

Hi gents, I'm thinking about picking one of those ECS boards up for a bit of tinkering around with along with that £35 Phoenix case. I know Byron couldn't fit an Silverstone AR04 in but I'm tempted to see if this Akasa will fit (29.5mm) as it's only a tenner on Amazon or if not, a NT07 (23mm). The Phoenix site list this as the compatible cooler but don't give any sizes (apart from the fan). It looks taller than the push-pins like the Akasa so it should fit.

Should be able to source an 8GB stick of RAM but I'll need a 4th gen CPU, ideally a T series. I could see if anyone would want to do a trade on a i5 6400T or something. I have a spare 256GB 2.5 Samsung SSD doing nowt in my main PC so that should sort storage out and I reckon there should be some 100-ish watt HP PSUs in work somewhere which should work.

 

Join the gang! Sonicgroove has a 4670T for £65 on his FS thread from last week. I've heard you need to be careful with power bricks, as there are a lot of fakes out there that don't have the power or work properly. Have Fun

 

Chuffed with the performance of the G3220T so far. I never expected to be able to play games on it, but I've just been running Iconoclasts on it flawlessly and I reckon some other lightweight 2D games will run just fine.

Height isn't the problem with the AR04, it was the width of the heatsink fins. Because of the heatpipes on the cooler you have to orient the cooler in a specific way, otherwise the heatpipes are blocked by voltage regulator modules on the board. On two sides of the cooler the fins extent out past the push pins; because of the orientation you need to have the AR04 in, those fins butt up against a cutout in the bottom case panel and you can't get the bottom panel back on. The board mounts upside down in that case, i.e. drawing air in from the bottom, and the part that's blocked is quite a thin piece of plastic. If I'd tried to mod it I would have ended up with a gaping hole in the bottom of the case.

So long as the fins of the cooler you're using don't protrude beyond the push-pins - and most low-profile coolers don't - then it should be OK. Best bet is to buy from somewhere with a good returns policy just in case; I couldn't return the cooler because I'd already used the little pack of thermal goo it came with.

 

... I did not know that.

But then I don't have the money right now anyway... and besides, I think if I upgrade this I'm going to go straight to i7 .

 

i7T? A touch of oxymoron to that methinks
There are a number of guys on SFF Forum who have been experimenting with T chips and found that they're surprisingly good, as are undervolted/underclocked i7 Ks...
Apparently the 330W Dell bricks in particular are something to be wary of when you're powering a grunty rig with a graphics card - yes nutters running 1050Ti from powered PCIe 4x to 16x risers

 

There are i7 S-series CPUs available too, they're 65W which is exactly what my cooler is designed for . In fact, CeX have an i7-4770S in stock right now..

 

HoHo... That's pretty good too.
Like you, I've found my G620T pretty nippy.
With a cheap old SSD, it boots Win7 in 16 sec and is great for office basics.
Part of me likes the masochistic idea of running an ITX rig with GTX 105 from a brick, but I don't need the complication!
I have always disliked bricks for PCs, but that little rig is so small, and quiet, I am impressed.
In fact, I was sufficiently impressed that I bought David's modded Microserver N40L that has had a PicoPSU and brick conversion, which makes it a lot quieter and manageable.

 

Cheers Byron. The Akasa is available on Amazon like the case so should it not fit, I should be able to return it.

Aye I saw. I'm not fully committed yet, hopefully it'll still be there when I know if I've got any disposable wonga left when I get paid. I hope that if I do go ahead, I hoping to be under £125 for it all.

 

Sod it, ordered the board and the case and cooler from Amazon with the code that was posted on the forum earlier. I've messaged sonicgroove about his 4670T and see if we can do something with my i5 6400T. I've checked and we've got 120w HP PSUs in work going spare so I'll nab one of those (should be compatible, same jack size/voltage as the older Dell ones) and an 8GB stick of RAM.

 

Some pics of the internals would be appreciated once the case arrives!

 

Here's one I found on a review from Amazon Italy:

 

Here you go @nimbu some more pics:







So, its got a standard USB header for the twin USB ports, two single row headers for the single port and the card reader, standard HD audio header and the switches and LEDs are all on one block too rather than individual cables. It does seem to match up with the header on the £16 ECS board so may be a standardised layout for thinITX boards? The 2.5" drive bay is as above, seems to leave enough room for the connectors but I'll probably get one of those Akasa slim SATA cables just to be safe. I'll take some more pics when the board is installed. The £10 Akasa K25 cooler seems to be the exact height of the internals so as long as the ECS board doesn't raise it up and its in the right spot, it should fit but my board hasn't arrived yet so I can't confirm.

Edit: Oh, and there's nowhere to mount any WIFI antennas so I'm planning on punching two holes in the IO shield and buying some pigtails like this.

 

One thing probably worth mentioning: If you're planning on going down the route of installing Ubuntu on one of these ECS boards don't be alarmed if it looks like there's nothing on the display. These boards have LVDS display headers and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off; Ubuntu thinks there's an in-built display and uses that as its primary display. I booted using a live USB and was able to disable the in-built LVDS video for the installation procedure (click on the "Power" icon in the top bar, open Settings, go to Devices, then Displays), but I kinda had to "guess" my way into logging in on first boot (tip - the user you created is selected by default; leave it a good while to make sure its sat at the log on prompt, press enter, type your password, then enter again - you should boot into desktop).

You can the LVDS display via kernel parameters in GRUB, but of course you have to be able to get to a working system first (or edit the GRUB parameters during boot, which is what I managed to do). Here's a stackexchange post detailing how to do this, and for reference my copy of /etc/default/grub:

Code:

# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.
# For full documentation of the options in this file, see:
#   info -f grub -n 'Simple configuration'

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0
GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT_QUIET=true
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=eDP-1:d"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

The important line is: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash video=eDP-1:d". By default it reads: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash". Just make sure you check with xrandr to make sure the internal display is labelled as eDP-1, but it should be the same as mine since we're talking about the same hardware...