Thinking about bulding a shuttle mini pc

[mcmada]

im thinking about building shuttle mini pc with left over parts and i think it be good for travelling, theres hdtvs everywhere with hdmi where i can hook it up no prob.
So im gonna have a i7-2600k, 4x 4gb corsair vengeance ram, gtx 580, and only thing i think i have to buy is a ssd. Anything else you guys think im gonna need? Thinking about making a custom case that can fit the whole pc, keyboard and all into, good idea or what?

Shuttle SZ77R5 Mini PC Barebone Intel Z77 LGA1155 DDR3 1PCI-E16 SATA3 USB3.0 HDMI 500W 80 Plus

 

[CaedenV]

Shuttles are great and fun, and wonderfully portable... What they are not great on is heat. While it can support a 580, I would want to put something in there that produced a bit less heat. Other than that I think it's a great idea!

 

[mcmada]

not too worried about the heat, atleast it shoots it out the back, maybe i can mod it to have a fan on top shooting air out. my main pc, i replaced the 2600k with a 3770k and 580 with a 680, so in a year or so, bam shuttle has been upgraded.

 

[guspaz]

I've got a Shuttle SZ77R5 with a GeForce GTX670 (the Gigabyte WindForce style cooler) and an i7-3770. Cooling is (with one caveat to be mentioned below) not an issue. My maximum temperatures under torture (Prime95 and FurMark running at the same time) are 85 on the GPU and 75-80 on the CPU.

Here's the caveat, though: the SZ77R5 did not ship with Ivy Bridge support (it was added in a later BIOS update), and the current BIOS version still does not properly support it. Temperatures are reported 20 degrees too low (so you need a +20 offset) and the default fan settings will cause the computer to overheat. No matter how hot the CPU gets, the default "smart fan" setting in the BIOS will result in the CPU fan never spinning up.

The temporary solution is to either set the fans to a higher fixed speed in the BIOS, or use SpeedFan to control the fan speed yourself. The fan gets rather loud at max speed (~4000 RPM), so the latter is what I'm doing to keep it quiet when I'm not torturing it.

That said, playing Diablo 3 for hours in a hot room and the fan was barely above minimum speed with CPU temperatures in the 50s; you only need to spin the fan faster in worst case scenarios.

Overall, I'm happy with it, but they really need to get a new BIOS out with this fix.