Building fast but small. Advise me.

[Witt]

Of the dozen or two PC's I've owned, I've hand built all but 2 or three. The last machine I built was a beast! Full ATX inside a full tower case. I had that machine for about 2.5 years and then the power supply let out a bang and fried nearly every component in the machine. So I bought a cheap Gateway and video card to hold me over.

Now it's time to build again, but I want to build small instead of big.

I have been looking at Micro ATX, and Micro ITX boards. I know it's going to get tricky trying to get all the components to fit in the case. I'll have to plan ahead. However, my main concern is bus speeds and perhaps heat dissipation.

Do these micro boards still have all the bus paths and speeds as an ATX???

If I throw in a nice CPU and water block, then overclock; am I going to cook motherboard components near the CPU???

Advise me... Discuss...

Here... This is a list of components I tossed together without doing much research. Sort of a rough draft for my build.

 

[Barney6262]

When overclocking you have to be careful you don't fry the cpu power delivery on the smaller micro atx boards... It should be fine though.
Any reason you want to go particularly small? It really doesn't bring many benefits. It's usually better to get a normal atx mobo with a smaller case than normal (Mid tower).

 

[GhislainG]

Overclocking won't be an issue because neither the motherboard nor the CPU allow it. If I were you I'd use a quiet air cooler.

 

[Witt]

Any reason you want to go particularly small? It really doesn't bring many benefits.

Yeah, several... First, I'm out of that giant tower phase. The case on my last build was a monster... It was 4 foot tall, 3 feet deep, and 12 to 14 inches wide. While it was beautiful... and one hell of a gaming rig.... It was always in the way due to it's size. Not to mention the empty case on its own was approaching 30 pounds. lol

Secondly, I plan on putting 3, 27" monitors on my desk. That doesn't leave much room for a large case...

Look at this Micro ITX case...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139033

This thing, though much taller, has nearly the same footprint as an iMac Mini... Unless you're trying to put waterblocks on large SLI setups, etc, I don't see much advantage to a larger case. (Other than ease of build, of course)

 

[Witt]

Overclocking won't be an issue because neither the motherboard nor the CPU allow it.

Coulda fooled me...

If I were you I'd use a quiet air cooler.

Unfortunately most air coolers simply won't fit in these smaller cases, and the shallow ones that will fit simply don't have enough clearance above the fan blades to get a good air flow over the radiator.

The water block is tiny, so the hardest part is figuring a route for the hoses. Also, the Thermaltake Micro ATX case is designed to mount the 3.0 Performer radiator, and the Corsair case is designed to mount their H101 (or whatever they call their popular waterblock/radiator.)

PS - I understand that I'm not going to get as much overclocking out of this, VS a full size ATX/Case... That's okay. Stock, this thing is powerful enough to run any game out there...

 

[Witt]

This is the hulking corpse of my last build. After being picked over for parts of course.

 

[Barney6262]

Ok, so what is your budget and what components did you salvage from your old computer (if you want to reuse them)
What are you using the rig for? gaming or media creation?

 

[Barney6262]

For gaming, a build with great specs. Will run pretty much any current game, maxed out, 60fps+.
Would be good for office work too as the cpu can be overclocked and is cooled by H100i.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/mCPpVn

 

[Witt]

For gaming, a build with great specs. Will run pretty much any current game, maxed out, 60fps+.
Would be good for office work too as the cpu can be overclocked and is cooled by H100i.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/mCPpVn

Yeah, you can build a pretty decent gaming rig for cheap these days. But it's the geek in me that can't wait for the 8 core Intel CPU's to become more common.