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Meet The Tiki: Core i7-3770K And GeForce GTX 680 In A Mini-ITX Box?
By , Kelt Reeves,
1. Falcon Northwest Gets Tom's Hardware's Attention

I already know what a Core i7-3770K can do. I’ve literally spent days benchmarking GeForce GTX 680s, and it’s safe to say I know how they perform, too. So, when a system builder wants to ship me a machine loaded down with the hardware I already have sitting on my test bench, there’s generally not a lot to get me excited.

But when I see those parts put together in a way that I, having built hundreds of machines, know I couldn’t equal, then I want to know more.

Kelt Reeves, president of Falcon Northwest, surprised us by sending the company’s new Tiki to the Tom’s Hardware office, even though we haven’t done system reviews in years. And yet, the Tiki’s size immediately impressed. They got a Core i7-3770K, a GeForce GTX 680, and 1 TB of solid-state storage in there?

Right away, I thought it’d be cool to step through how the Tiki came to be, and what it actually took to cram high-end hardware into a quiet mini-ITX-based chassis. I asked Kelt if he’d be willing to tell the story to our audience, and he agreed. What follows is from Kelt's perspective, and it should be quite the tale!

-Chris Angelini, Worldwide Editor-in-Chief

2. March 1, 2011: An Idea And A Pile Of Hardware

We’ve been into small form-factor systems ever since creating the FragBox back in 2003. And obviously, smaller is better. But for almost a decade, going any smaller than microATX meant proprietary, power-starved little boxes that weren’t much good for an enthusiast. In early 2011, the stars started to align, portending more power-efficient CPUs and GPUs. Mini-ITX motherboards were looking promising too. I wanted to build a smaller system that would leverage all of those advancements. So, I piled up parts in a way I thought they’d work thermally in a tower and photographed them from various angles. I wanted to know the minimum dimensions a well-loaded enthusiast system might fit into. Forget power, cooling, cabling, and noise. Physically, just how much could the parts be condensed? The answer turned out to be about 12” x 12” x 4”.

3. Tiki Takes Shape As A Four-Inch-Wide Tower

Typically, a system cannot be slimmer than the 5” a graphics card plugged into a motherboard consumes. But I wanted to use a 90-degree riser card to turn the video card sideways, creating a thinner tower. This setup had been done before in HTPCs. However, power and heat would be limiting factors. In fact, the early-2011 hardware in this picture probably wouldn’t have worked. Nvidia's GeForce GTX 480 was a power-gobbling beast, and the 350 W SFX power supply wouldn’t have cut it. But the roadmaps were all pointing in the same direction: more power-efficient components should be on their way. We might be able to make a system this small. Whether we could cool it and then keep it quiet were the unanswered questions. I opened a new micro-tower case design project anyway.

4. Before It Was Tiki: Code-Name Cygnus

All of our projects need code names while they’re in development. Intel uses the names of rivers. AMD uses islands. Nvidia uses famous scientists. I name ours after spaceships in movies. This one was “Cygnus” (extra points for anyone who remembers the movie). After showing my component layout pictures to our case manufacturer, its engineers pitched me on several external aesthetics. That’s not usually the way we work, though. Usually, I pitch them what I think is a great-looking case and they tell me “metal doesn’t bend that way.” Then, we compromise somewhere in between. Instead, Cygnus Prototype 1 took shape from one of their concept drawings.

5. Virtual Design Begins

Several months of emailing 3D models back and forth with our case manufacturer began. This is where the fantasy of “I want to make a case exactly the size of these parts in this pile” met the manufacturing reality of “this part needs to attach to these parts using metal that needs to be this thick.” The 3D modeling stage is also where I try to visualize every conflict, wiring path, heat source, and thermal transfer. Essentially, the whole system working, in my head.

6. September, 2011: Cygnus Prototype 1 Is Complete

The factory sent these photos to us. Prototypes are not glamorous. First prototypes, especially, are usually pretty rough. Really, their purpose is to test basic build functionality and get an idea of the look. Little or no effort was put into aesthetics at that stage. But, like Michelangelo looking at a block of marble, you should be able to see the statue within.

It’s hard not to be really disappointed at all the work that went into envisioning a perfect, beautiful, little system, and then you get this ill-fitting beast as the first look at it. Needless to say, she didn’t look anything like her profile picture.

7. At Least She Had A Great Personality

Inside, beauty was happening, though. Cygnus’s layout and overall size were coming together much as I’d hoped in my first “pile of stuff and a ruler” concept. It’s always neat to see ideas you’ve worked on only virtually in CAD come together physically (even if early prototypes are really expensive, hand-made, one-of-a-kind, and ugly).

8. Cygnus Prototype 1 Is Scrapped

See that horrible gap on the corner? Evidently, metal just doesn’t bend that way…at least not well. I was starting to hate the look anyway. This just wasn’t Falcon. It looked so much better in CAD than in reality. And since the metal wasn’t handling the curves we were trying to bend, we would’ve had to change the front to plastic to make corners fit right. Falcon PCs are not plastic. So, I scrapped the entire exterior. In fact, this one was so far from what we wanted there was no point in even having it shipped to us. Form follows function, but, for our clientele, the form also has to be beautiful. Back to the drawing board.

9. Inspiration Strikes Again

Last year, we introduced a completely new chassis for our venerable Mach V line, the Icon2. This full tower has a vertical airflow orientation, is two feet tall, and two feet deep. It’s our largest enclosure, so it’s not right for everyone’s desk. But just about everyone does like the clean and understated look. In the back of my mind, I thought that this was the direction Tiki should go. Prototype 1’s dismal first impression was the push I needed to re-imagine the system with this look. Tiki was going to be “…exactly like you in every way… just 1/8th your size.”

10. Rework And Repeat

After another couple of months working on virtual layout, the redesign began and the real Tiki started to take shape. I don’t really remember when the “Tiki” name first came to me, but I’m Hawaiian in my mind and love Tiki culture. I liked the idea of a little Tiki idol that was a small representation of god-like power. It just seemed to fit.

11. Christmas, 2011: Tiki Prototype 2 Is Complete!

Now, this is more Falcon-like. Prototype 2 was a massive leap forward in aesthetic quality, and a lot of re-work was done inside as well. To keep the minimalist front, the optical drive was moved to the top, requiring some juggling of the internal drives. Tiki was also at its final dimensions at this point—a svelte 4” wide, 13.25” tall, and 13.5” deep. That’s 716 cubic inches of volume. By comparison, our FragBox microATX-based small form-factor system is 1225 cubic inches, or 71% larger! Yet, Tiki can handle a 13”-long graphics card, three hard drives, an optical drive, and a 450 W internal power supply.

12. Prototype 2’s First Build Goes Smoothly

At this point, we anticipated that Tiki would employ an air-cooled CPU, and we were testing with a still power-hungry GeForce GTX 580. The only enthusiast-oriented mini-ITX board that fit our needs was a Zotac platform. But at least one existed! The basic build went together really well. It was time to start sweating the details.

13. Nitpicking Everything

I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so this is where things started getting very annoying for our manufacturing partners. We can’t provide a perfect product unless we demand perfection from our suppliers. My goal on the prototypes was to find every possible manufacturing defect, design flaw, sloppy tolerance, and cosmetic issue. This resulted in a long PowerPoint-based bug-list for manufacturing essentially saying “Great job! Now, here are 50 things that need fixing.”

14. But How Well Does It Work?

Once we knew that Tiki would hold the components we wanted in the dimensions we specified, it was time for a little analysis. How well would our case actually work? It’s not enough to look pretty and have screw holes in all of the right places. Cramming high-end hardware into a tiny space is a recipe for a cooling nightmare.

The chassis is only 100 mm-wide. A standard cooling fan is 120 mm wide and 25 mm deep. How would our CAD model hold up when we fired up the (then) fastest Sandy Bridge-based CPU, three hard drives, and a GeForce GTX 580? Would our goal of creating a powerful, yet quiet, system be shattered by the need for noisy cooling fans? You just can’t model an airflow/cooling system this complex in CAD. You just have to build it and try it.

15. When You Want To See Heat, Use Predator-Vision

Our thermal imaging camera and software both confirmed that our design was sending heat where we wanted it to go—out the top and rear of the chassis—and that we were getting some exhaust blowback in a few areas. Also, the 80 mm fan vent over the CPU was adequate. If only we had room for a 120 mm fan in there! A 120 mm fan would have pushed more air and generated less noise than an 80 mm fan.

16. Scotch Tape FTW!

A 120 mm cooling fan over the CPU would’ve been the best choice for the most airflow and least noise. It just wouldn’t fit. At least, it didn’t fit in the 3D models. But, over and over, I discovered that there were millimeters of available space everywhere if you used the right parts installed in the right order. So, through the cunning application of Scotch tape, we bent the laws of physics and crammed a 120 mm fan on the side.

Just because HAL the CAD program says, “Sorry, I can’t do that Dave,” doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.

17. Testing Airflow

Thermal imaging can tell you what’s getting hot, but it doesn’t help visualize airflow. Is our top vent getting hot because of the graphics card under it, or are we actually getting the vertical exhaust we intended? For that, you need smoke testing. We use a smoke generator that looks like it’d require a medical marijuana card to own, and passers-by my office wonder why smoke drifts out of it like Cheech and Chong’s van. I swear, it’s just superheated mineral oil. Back off, man. I’m a scientist.

18. Frickin’ Laser Beams!

Industrial lasers are used to cut a lot of the complex shapes in our metal cases, which is cool. What’s not cool is that the heat they generate is so intense that it actually melts the metal in the smaller cutouts. Tiki’s laser-cut fan grills were melting just a bit. In fact, they slightly bowed in, so the grill would rub on the fan’s hub and make noise or stop the fan altogether.

Fixing that was easy compared to the complexity of creating the backlit Falcon logo in the case’s aluminum front. Of course, we could’ve just painted the logo instead. But that would’ve been way less cool. And Tiki had to be cool.

Notice that Tiki had a brushed finish on its aluminum faceplate. We changed that to match the sand-blasted finish on our other products. It’s more expensive, but it doesn’t show fingerprints as easily and it looks nicer.

19. The Drive Plate

I have to call out the amazing work of a designer named Ellis, who created this deceptively-simple component. This single piece of metal holds an optical drive, two 2.5” solid-state drives, and a full-sized 3.5” disk. There are 12 different folds in this piece of metal going six different directions, including one Z-shaped bend only 2 mm-high!

20. Prototypes 3 And 4

Five more months were spent tweaking details after the second prototype arrived. Getting it right required two more physical prototypes, and even a few un-prototyped changes that technically made the production units physical version number five.

I got really sucked into the details, and Tiki turned out to be my most involved case project ever. I drove a few of our suppliers crazy, though, as there’s much more to a chassis than just the metal.

21. Trying Them Out, One By One

Heat sink and fan vendors also received a full dose of my obsessive testing and endless evaluation requests.

It turns out that, even with a chassis sporting intake and exhaust vents exactly where they need to be, getting sufficient air in and out of the system without causing a racket is a major hurdle. On Tiki, specifically, it became an obsession. I tested an enormous number of fans and heat sinks, and they’re still piled up in my office. I need to clean that up sometime.

22. Noise And Temperature Testing

Striking the right balance between CPU/GPU temperatures and fan noise was really important because excessive noise is one of the top complaints about small form-factor PCs ever since they first emerged. This is one of several pages of fan testing data. These spreadsheets, full of numbers, are the result of testing more than 30 different fans in more than 75 different combinations to find that right balance. This involved setting up a fan combination, pushing the CPU and GPU to their maximum heat individually, then at the same time, and running each condition for 30 minutes or more. The noise level was measured with a decibel meter at four points around the case.

One of the maddening issues we found with Tiki is that it’s so thin, and has so few exhaust points (by design), that, if you push too much air on the CPU intake side of the case, it overpowers the video card’s intake fan and turns it into an exhaust. Not ideal.

23. One Hundred Tiny Conflicts

Building a system this small utilizing only industry standard parts gives us great flexibility with the components we can use. With that said, when it came to shopping for enthusiast-oriented, overclockable mini-ITX motherboards, Zotac offered the only viable platform throughout almost all of Tiki’s development. It makes excellent boards, but through no fault of Zotac’s we hit an ugly snag: Tiki’s USB 3.0 ports are up top, and if you’ve seen the plugs that come off the corresponding cables, they’re pretty large and inflexible.

The two round black cables in this picture enable USB 3.0 up front, and they hit our power plug cable. But it looks like we just got around it, right? Nope. There’s a 120 mm fan on the side panel that hits these cables when you close the system up. Using the Zotac board, we either couldn’t close the case, or we’d break the USB 3.0 header off the motherboard when we did. So, how did we fix this one?

24. Asus, To The Rescue

We’ve used Asus motherboards almost exclusively for close to a decade. I love the company’s motherboards, and its design team really listens to us when we request features and products. If you look close in the first “pile of parts” picture, where the idea for Tiki was forming, you’ll see one of Asus’ previous mini-ITX efforts, the P6H67-I. It used laptop memory, which is slower, and had no overclocking options. Asus didn’t see mini-ITX as an enthusiast market. But I had been bugging its engineers to create an enthusiast-oriented mini-ITX board since the Tiki project started.

Very late in Tiki’s development, Asus finally sent me a sample of the P8Z77-I Deluxe. I can’t say enough good things about this little monster. Without turning this into a total sales pitch, I’ll simply say that this ingenious design relocated the CPU, allowing us to put in larger coolers and solved our USB 3.0 cable conflict. It overclocks as well as Asus’ standard desktop boards, too.

25. 99.8% Of Heat Sinks Don’t Fit In Tiki

Originally, we planned to air-cool Tiki. But what heat sink and fan combo would we use? We wanted overclockability from even the fastest CPUs. However, finding a solution to even fit in our tiny box was going to be a challenge. Asus’ CPU positioning opened up a few larger heat sink possibilities, but most enthusiast-oriented air-coolers have transitioned to vertical orientations over the past few years. We didn’t have the height needed to support such a configuration. But we found a few performance sinks that fit, like this Zalman “flower” design. YES!!!

26. No!

Even if you accept the fact that you’d have to remove the heat sink and motherboard just to change memory, taller 1866 MT/s modules keep it from seating properly anyway. Even larger memory modules are flat-out impossible to install.

27. Time To Try Custom Heat Sinks

DeepCool was good enough to reopen manufacturing on two of its older models to create a few prototypes for us. This one fits!

28. Defeat, Again!

Its heat pipes hit a sink on the motherboard, though, preventing good CPU contact. I have a dozen more potential-victory/ultimate-defeat trial-and-error stories, but I’ll spare you the drama. The takeaway is that mini-ITX is a pretty brutal form factor, and you can’t just buy the parts you like and drop them in as you might in an ATX-based build. Mini-ITX is an exercise in clearance, and your calipers will get a regular workout measuring fractions of a millimeter.

29. Searching For The Right Solution

The entire time I was testing air-coolers I had some samples of next-generation, unreleased liquid coolers from Asetek sitting in a box. I’d already tested a version with larger radiators, and it performed well. But there was another version in there, too. It had a thinner radiator than the model we used in our larger desktops. But there was still no effing way it would fit in a Tiki, which is 100 mm-wide, total. Once you mount the motherboard and CPU, we have 53 mm from the top of the CPU to the side-panel fan. A liquid cooler, even a thin one, employs a 30 mm-thick radiator, a 30 mm-thick pump, and a 25 mm-thick cooling fan. Plus, there’s the hose bend radius you have to consider. There’s just no bloody reason to even try it.

30. “You Know, Sometimes I Amaze Even Myself”

It took some serious qualification to accommodate a liquid cooler (including custom fans we had to have made in Japan), but the overclocking capabilities of Tiki just skyrocketed. And our overall noise level dropped, too.

31. Finishing Touches: The Granite Base

We’re pretty sure that granite has never been used before in a production PC. After all, affixed to a mid-tower chassis, a granite base would weigh 40 pounds. We learned several other reasons why this stone isn’t a material system builders like to work with. But the idea came about out of necessity.

We discovered the hard way that, when you reduce a tower to only four inches-wide, it’s fairly easy to knock over. A stray elbow, a pet, or a young child will eventually put your Tiki down and block a cooling intake. Even if not everyone needed it, we wanted to at least provide an option to stabilize the tower without significantly increasing its width.

32. We Tried Feet

They’re plastic. They’re inexpensive. They’re light. They’re 92% useless.

33. So Instead, We Used Expensive Rocks

The Tiki needed more weight on the bottom to prevent from tipping over. That weight needed to look good and not affect the system’s footprint in a significant way. So, I approached the company that made the granite countertops for my kitchen with the idea for a Tiki base. See this ginormous machine? It cuts huge granite countertops with diamond-tipped bits. It’s made in Italy and costs $500 000. See that tiny rectangle of black stone at the man’s foot? That’s a Tiki base prototype. If I didn’t already know the nice family that runs this outfit and work with them in the past, they probably would’ve thrown me out on my butt after prototype change number three. Now we’re in production and cutting 100 Tiki bases from each eight-foot master slab of granite. But, for several months of making and re-making prototypes, this machine operator gave me dirty looks for setting up such a large piece of hardware for dinky 13” parts.

34. Now It Needs Edging And Polishing…

We used another few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of computerized machinery for edging and polishing. That water raining down off the machines is coolant, as cutting rocks with diamond bits causes a bit of friction.

35. A Beautiful Result

The granite base took months of tweaking to get right, and even now we’re still tweaking it. Just this week we figured out a way to attach the base without visible screws. Previously, that was only possible if we were willing to break one diamond drill bit per base cut. Generally, cost is our last concern. But that machine operator would’ve slashed my tires if he had to change all of those bits.

36. Final Thoughts

Most system-builder CEOs are probably much busier running their shops than designing cases and testing fans, but that’s why I like keeping Falcon Northwest a boutique. I’m an enthusiast at heart, and Tiki is our first product that literally could not be built by anyone but an enthusiast. If the wiring isn’t bound perfectly, Tiki doesn’t fit together. It’s only quiet if you use exactly the right fans. It doesn’t even work in a CAD model. But I built the system I wanted on my own desk. I firmly believe that, with the recent advancements in power efficiency and miniaturization, micro-towers will become the new mid-tower in a few years. I hope Tiki becomes a showcase of what can be done in this form factor.

My sincere thanks to Tom’s Hardware for allowing me to share Tiki’s backstory with you!