The Mini-ITX build begins.

[Chicken Patty]

That looks hella fun!

 

[Lazzer408]

Well it's been months! My sheetmetal guy sold his business so that's why this has been on the back burner for so long. I found a new shop that's allowing me access to their scraps and equipment as long as I maintain a couple of their office computers. I've also put some cash aside over the fall/winter so I can dive back into the project now.

 

[Lazzer408]

How's the m-atx industry doing as far as power supplies? I found this one that seems to have some good reviews and specs.
SeaSonic SS-350SFE 350W SFX12V V3.1 80 PLUS Cert... 36a 12v

There's also KDX who makes OEM supplies.
http://www.directron.com/m7480dmmicro.html 24a 12v
http://www.directron.com/m7520dm.html 30a 12v

The 520 looks promising because of it's 8-pin EPS-12V and also 8-pin pci-e power connectors. Must have a hella 12v rail on it. 30a from what I've been able to find. The Seasonic claims 36a on 12v but it's less expencive.

Do you guys know of any other good m-atx supplies?

The reason I'd like to go with these supplies is because they have 60mm fans. The m-atx psu with the 80mm fan means I have to make an opening in the bottom of the chassis to allow airflow to the psu. That means at least .5 to .75" feet on the bottom of the case.

 

[Lazzer408]

UPDATES:

I ordered the Zotac GF9300-G-E. The LGA-775 one with 3 SATA ports. If I had an I-series CPU handy I'd have gone with a different model. This build will still use the Q9550 I've been using in the past. I also went with the 480w KDM power supply. http://www.directron.com/m7480dmmicro.html It uses 2 thermally-controlled 60mm fans. Hopefully they are quiet. I wanted to avoid cutting a hole in the bottom of the chassis and having to use large feet to allow airflow under it.

The HDD mount is designed to hold 1x 3.5" or 2x 2.5". A small SSD for the OS and a 500gb laptop spinner would provide plenty of storage for a gaming rig. One can always add an E-SATA or USB external drive for their media library. This mount's design uses rubber gromets to keep the drive isolated from the chassis to reduce noise.

There are now NO CHASSIS FANS! Only the CPU blower, GFX card blower, and 2 60mm in the PSU. All fans are thermally controlled. Each fan vents it's own heat directly out of the chassis. The case vents will be offset from the fans to also help reduce noise.

Prototype #2's base, cover, front and back plates are cut and once the board shows up friday, I can cut the expansion slots and i/o shield holes.

AIRFLOW:

The first fan to get cool inlet air is the GPU. Airflow passes over the harddrive(s) on the way to it so the drive does get some cooling. GPU blows hot air out of the chassis. A barrier down the middle of the chassis then directs remaining airflow towards the front where some is sucked out by the PSU. PSU blows hot air out of the chassis. The airflow continues over the northbridge heatsink then sucked through the CPU heatsink by the CPU blower. CPU blows hot air out of the chassis. No hot air is recirculated inside. I've spent alot of time testing many different configurations and this is an epic win by far.

I know I know... Pics soon.

EDIT - Here is a picture showing airflow through the chassis. The yellow line is the barrier I mentioned. It also serves to hold the riser card. The CPU fan shown is not what I'll be using. I'm using a blower as shown in the second pic. The HD5870 size cards will fit. Who knows if the 480w Micro-ATX can run it.

 

[Lazzer408]

I hit up the PSU calculator http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine and put the following.

Mini-ITX motherboard
QX9650@3ghz (I have one to test)
2 sticks DDR-2
HD5870
1 SATA HDD
1 SSD HDD
1 DVD-RW
2 USB devices (mouse/keyboard)
10% capacitor aging
90% system load

The KDM is rated at 480w so it will have to be a high quality PSU to manage the load. I'm sure the system will draw less then 423w unless your crunching.

 

[Thrackan]

If a 480w PSU can't handle a 400w load it's crap imho... Any PSU should be able to do that.
Unless you're going to be completely stressing both CPU and GPU at the same time, it should not even touch 400w.

 

[Lazzer408]

If a 480w PSU can't handle a 400w load it's crap imho... Any PSU should be able to do that.
Unless you're going to be completely stressing both CPU and GPU at the same time, it should not even touch 400w.

That's what I figured. I read andand's review of the HD 5870 just to see what their results were. With their DX58SO i7 3.33ghz test rig they managed 401w running the OCCT benchmark. I'm more worried about the noise. That KDM 480 is a 80 PFC supply. It should do fine.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/2841/26

If a 480w PSU can't do 480w it's junk. lol

EDIT - I take that back. The 520 has active-PFC but the 480 is "high efficiency" . It doesn't specifically state any active-PFC.

 

[Thrackan]

Our own TPU review says ~150w 'peak' and 212w as an absolute max on the 5870.

And noise can be fixed ofc Better fan and/or more air holes in the PSU maybe?

 

[Lazzer408]

Our own TPU review says ~150w 'peak' and 212w as an absolute max on the 5870.

And noise can be fixed ofc Better fan and/or more air holes in the PSU maybe?

It has 2x 60mm fans and you know what a pair of small fans can sound like when they resonate. Everything shows up friday so we'll see. I'm still tempted to pick up a 520w just to compair. The 520 has 2 express power connectors also.

 

[DrunkenMafia]

FYI

I have a mate who has a shuttle with a 450w psu and it runs a HD5870 fine, has been for about 18 months. He has E8600, 4gb & 2 HDD's.

Good luck with the build Lazzer

 

[Geofrancis]

good to see the project still going! i have gave up on ITX computers for now. the lack of expandability was starting to get to me. like being stuck with onboard audio so im onto the micro atx computers again so i can use my 4870 x2 without having to jump through hoops getting specific power supplys and cases then hoping it will all work.

 

[Lazzer408]

good to see the project still going! i have gave up on ITX computers for now. the lack of expandability was starting to get to me. like being stuck with onboard audio so im onto the micro atx computers again so i can use my 4870 x2 without having to jump through hoops getting specific power supplys and cases then hoping it will all work.

What's wrong with on-board audio? Hopefully some day I can offer this as a bare-bones. That's why I'm spending so much time sorting things out so the customer doesn't have to. It wouldn't be hard to scale this into a m-ATX platform either. I have given thought to it. My bottom line is to make this as small as I can while maintaining off-the-shelf components. The only thing that's not available, besides the chassis itself, is the CPU fan but a stock low-profile Intel cooler will work ok as long as your not overclocking.

All I managed to finish today was a mock-up for the PSU mount/duct.

 

[Lazzer408]

Small update:

I didn't like the PSU mounting method so I've altered it. Besides the divider between the videocard and motherboard, I'll also intergrate part of the PSU mount into another divider between the PSU and motherboard. There's a piece of 1/2" angle sticking up in the air. This will become the mount for one side of the power supply. The other side of the PSU will use a similar mounting method attached to the front face. The dividers will be punched full of holes/slots and are not complete and could even hold a small 40~60mm fan inside the chassis to assist circulation.
The first divider I mentioned, between the videocard and motherboard, will hold the 16x PCI-E riser card and is also 1/2 of the hard drive mounting rails. I posted the example I used before of the harddrive mounting. It'll be the bottom 2 examples in the last photo.

I just wanted to throw up a pic to maintain interest.

 

[Lazzer408]

Here's some sexy updates.

Hard drive rails isolated from main chassis with grommets. Drive rail is drilled for a single 3.5" but I will be adding a set of holes to mount 2x 2.5" drives. Either will fit.

--------------------------------------
EDIT - FAIL! I think the HDD was to close to the videocard. Depending on the location of the videocard's fan, it could interfere with the airflow. There was only 1/4" between them. I'll have to put the gromets on the drive itself and bolt the rails straight to the chassis. Not a big deal. DVD is now mounted.
--------------------------------------

A PCI-E flex riser was used and hard mounted to the internal structure of the chassis. It has a latch to hold the card edge into the connector and is rock solid.

The motherboard now has it's own chamber. This served as the PCI-E slot mount and should help keep the motherboard and CPU much cooler. The videocard creates a fair amount of heat off it's back that isn't drawn out the by it's fan. I'd like to keep that heat away from the motherboard. I'll put holes in the back of the chassis above the i/o shield for the cpu blower to draw air into the chamber. That will allow only cool air to enter the chamber. Heat from the videocard will be pulled through the chassis and drawn out by the PSU fans.

 

[Lazzer408]

My drive rails will not fit in the space I provided when I use grommets. =( In the begining of the 2nd chassis, I reduced it from 12.5" wide to 12" wide. I made it to narrow to mount my drives on grommets. BUT! I had a great idea. If I go back to 12.5 wide I'll have room for USB ports in front on the left side, have my HDD grommets, and here's the sweet part. If I align the drive right, I'll have room for a 2x 2.5" mobile rack in the rear of the chassis below the graphics card for easy drive access without having to remove the cover.

 

[l0ud_sil3nc3]

very nice thread, I love following mitx builds

 

[Lazzer408]

Thanks. Glad someone is liking it. =)

I ran to Microcenter and picked up a 2x 2.5" mobile rack. It has all the same bolt pattern as a 3.5" drive so either the mobile rack or a 3.5" HDD will fit. The graphics fan looks tight but I can actually fit my thumb in there so it should flow nicely.

 

[Lazzer408]

Well cough up another dead board for Zotac! I managed to power this thing up maybe 5 or 6 times and now it's dead. So I guess the whole project comes to a screetching stop until I get an RMA from Schmotac. =(

 

[Geofrancis]

thats crap man

 

[Lazzer408]

thats crap man

I know. You ever look at the Newegg reviews on these things? They drop like flies.

 

[stevednmc]

That sux about the mobo! Ive been following this build for a longtime, i cant wait to see the finished product!

 

[Geofrancis]

have you found a power supply to run it yet? i came across this psu when i was researching a different project.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/350w-be-quiet-bn134-80-plus-86-eff-sfx-micro-atx

 

[Lazzer408]

have you found a power supply to run it yet? i came across this psu when i was researching a different project.

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/350w-be-quiet-bn134-80-plus-86-eff-sfx-micro-atx

http://www.directron.com/m7480dmmicro.html

I bought the KDM 480w. So far it runs a Core2Duo and the HD5870 and made it through 3dMark11 with no problems. It runs very cool but the fan controller isn't working. The fans run on high all the time even if the system is idle. It's always blowing cold air so the fans don't need to be running so fast.

 

[Lazzer408]

It looks like the PCI-E port has stopped functioning. It will post and boot using the on-board video but I've tried 4 PCI-E cards and none of them will post. Tried resetting the BIOS. Tried another power supply. Tried other memory. Notta. I don't think the flex riser would have caused this problem. It worked a few times then quit. Have to RMA the board I guess.

EDIT - I had it working for a little while by setting the BIOS to initialize the PCI-E graphics first. I managed to boot into Windows with the HD5870 installed and run Prime95 for a few minutes to watch temps. It hit 58c. When I closed Prime95, the desktop went black, came back, went black again then locked. I hit reset only to power up with no video. I shut it down and tried the on-board again and it powered up with a black screen. I tried switching the memory and was trying one stick at a time and now it's completely dead. No power at all. Tried another power supply and it's still dead.

Zotac has a horrible reputation for these boards dying. There's I think 3 or 4 versions of the 775 board and they still don't have it right. That's too bad too because there isn't many options for ITX boards that have a PCI-E connector. It was nice to have a cheap ITX 775 board to stick our old hardware into but what good it is if they drop like flies?

I sent Zotac an a$$reaming email. I wonder if they'll respond.

EDIT - Bought another board. Testing now. So far so good but I wonder how long this one will last. :/ New board works but instability when using the flex extention cable. =( I wonder if that's what cause the first board to fail.

 

[Lazzer408]

STABILITY!

The errors with the graphics card detection/initialization/corruption were solved with aluminum duct tape. The graphics card is now furmark torture stable. (HD5870)

I also started mounting the power supply and bought some mini SATA cables. There's -some- room behind the psu, and above the optical drive, for the bulk of the wiring. I actually need just one molex connector that goes to a diy splitter to feed the mobile rack and the optical drive. I have to clean up the wiring on the PSU but I wasn't done testing it. After all, if it couldn't run the system why hack it up?

You may also notice the PCI-E power connectors stick past the edge of the chassis. I mentioned I was making it 0.5" wider so I'll have plenty of room.

And for the first of many new CPU load tests... My little 1.8ghz C2D test chip managed only 39c after 15min of prime with my blower.