[aotsukisho]

I've come to the conclusion that I need a mobile unit to take around to LAN parties and the like, and as such I'm looking to build an unorthodox uATX or mITX box. Its components will not be top of the line, but in a configuration that I would like to think is one of a kind as nobody is stupid enough to mix these parts together.


First piece of the computer acquired via ebay


...from an obviously ignorant seller. I'm not sure how it looked when it was originally packed, but I'm guessing it was around the middle judging from the dings in the box cardboard.


No padding or wrapping means that it got jostled quite a bit,and the PCI bracket got bent in shipment.


It was clearly not bent in the auction photos, so this definitely counts as shipping damage.


Either way, here's the card. It's a highly exclusive, twin Kepler architecture GTX 690. This thing is very important in terms of Nvidia's history, as it was its last mainstream dual-GPU card (Titan Z I believe also was), and it is the birth of the now-standard aluminum shelled vapor chamber heatsinked Nvidia Reference Cooler.


Here it is next to the MSI GTX 750ti that was used in this build.


I think this particular 690 was from an Alienware prebuild, which is why it has that bracket on the rear. I needed to remove it in order to fit the card in the uATX blast from the past case and test it out to see if being shipped without protection killed it.


Rear plate removed.


Took awhile, but I managed to fit it into the case.


Slight problem though, there was a bracket on the case that contacted the card in the rear.


Keeping the GTX 690 from shorting on the support by using a crappy Magic card lol.

I hooked it up to a Seasonic X-650 power supply, and it runs fine (surprisingly). I ran the Monster Hunter Online benchmark tool, and it scored a 95th percentile. The 2+2GB VRAM configuration is kind of limiting, but I'm hoping that it'll be okay for limited game playing. For some reason Overwatch on my GTX 980ti uses up around 1.5GB at 1440p, while running the basic MHO benchmark at 720p on a 1440x900 display it uses up just over 2000MB. I wonder why that's the case?

Speaking of cases, I suppose that's next on the list. I was actually looking for a now out-of-production Corsair 380t but they are extremely hard to find at $250+ these days...

CPU+mobo I'm looking at the new Kaby Lake i3-7350K. It's the first overclockable Core i3, and allegely hits 5.0GHz out of the box with ease. Paired with a Z270 chipset board (more than likely an Asus one), it should prove to be quite the budget overclocker. It's a 60W TDP processor, compared to 91W I believe for the full fledged unlocked i5 and i7, so I'm hopeful that the power phases on the board help it reach a high overclock compared to overclocking a thirstier, more expensive CPU.

For clearance reasons, the GTX 690 is 11.0" (280mm) long, and my Seasonic X-650 going into this build is a standard ATX size 160mm length one.

[aotsukisho]

Slightly considering going to uATX form factor for running quad SLI with two 690s...but I will probably stick with the mini design. Here's my prospective choices as of right now:

http://amzn.to/2mcVfX3
Asus ROG Strix Z270I motherboard. It will go well with the black and matte silver color scheme of the GTX 690.

http://amzn.to/2m8ZiDx
I'm highly interested in the first unlocked i3 ever, the Core i3-7350K. It doesn't score quite as high on multithreaded as its Core i5 bigger brother, but tends to do just as well everywhere else. It is pricey for an i3, but hopefully by the time I build the PC the price drops.

[aotsukisho]

Photos to come shortly, since my case came in last night. I'm looking to replace the stock Tt front fan with an LED one for bling factor, and the current candidate is the 200mm Bitfenix Spectre Pro LED with a white chassis.

TT-2030 vs Spectre Pro LED
800rpm - 900rpm
130 CFM - 149 CFM
28 dBA - 27 dBA
1.0 mm-Hg - 1.4 mm-Hg
200mA - 330mA

Interestingly, the Spectre Pro LED 200mm is also 5mm thinner. Even more interesting is that there's also a Spectre Pro LED 230mm, but with 200mm width. I will need to take a lot of measurements and possibly even print out some templates to see if the 230mm will fit, as that will make it a nice upgrade with +7 CFM, +0.5 mm-HG and -2 dBA (also +80mA draw)...with the best part being it's also only +$1 on Amazon.

I was also looking to see if there's a possibility of putting a Corsair H100 in it, but although it possibly can it cuts into cable management space so for this project I'll probably just use an industry-standard Corsair H80i v2...unless I wanna just go with the Corsair H55 I got for cheap.

[aotsukisho]

Finally some photos!


It finally came in from Amazon after a longer than ideal wait.


Opening up the box


Slightly worryingly found a thumbscrew at the bottom of the box


Out of the plastic and Styrofoam


Removing the top panel to get to the guts


There's three unique panels, two perforated on one half and the third is the see through one.


Looking at the underside of the top panel.


The reason why there was a thumbscrew missing was because one of them had come off of a HDD caddy, and it was banging around the inside of the case.


Swinging round the rear of the case


This plastic piece covers the PCI screws, it's actually a rather clever and I'm guessing cheap solution.


The stock PCI shields are perforated, and extremely cheap feeling. In fact, this entire case has a lot of that extremely cheap feeling thing going on, but it's very intelligently engineered and of course it's very cheap anyway so I will not fault them for that.


Checking out the bottom panel, with the PSU intake filter. This one is fully modular too so you can choose which side of the case is 'down', but the PSU mount itself does not move.


You need to remove the bottom panel in order to stuff in a PSU.


Seasonic X-650 fits inside nicely.


On the front is Thermaltake's 200mm fan. It's a very strange part with no concrete specs from what I gather...It's marked as a TT-2030 (20cm chassis 30mm thick) but on the Tt site it's listed under a Pure 20 design. The specs that the user manual gives is different than the Pure 20's specs, even though the Pure 20 product photos very clearly show the TT-2030 markings.


There's the aforementioned TT-2030 marking


Very glad to find out that my GTX 690 does indeed fit inside the chassis, it protrudes past the metal part but there's some space between the graphics card and the front plastic bezel piece.


A head-on view of the positioning


Now for a more directly square view.


Looking through the standard ventilation holes


Unfortunately the window has a rather large border on the sidepanel so most of it is hidden...


Some Arctic F8 fans came in too. It was only a few dollars more to get a 5-pack than to get the individual fans retail...


Opening up the box, it also comes with a set of self tapping mounting screws.


Ready to go in


Installed, you can barely see them in there.


View from the inside.

We will see what direction this computer takes, a friend might want to do his mini build in this case and if he does I will probably transfer the project over to a uATX build so I can do stupid things like run two GTX 690s in (quad) SLI. There probably won't be any updates from this project for awhile, so we shall see what turns up until the next update.

[aotsukisho]

So things turned out not as planned, and as a result this will be a uATX project instead. I got lucky on ebay and obtained the motherboard for this project for an amazing price, and as a result I was nudged to go slightly larger than intended.


Silverstone SUGO SG-11. I decided on this one instead of the SG-12 due to the fact that because it didn't have a face handle, it was $30 cheaper with identical internals.


Opening the box and pulling out the case


Well-ventilated, but the lack of filters annoys me. I cannot complain at this price however, and there are aftermarket (or homemade) options available.


Looking underneath


Looking around the rear


Removing the outer case, it comes off as a 3-sided panel just like on power supplies.


Removing the screw at the front of the brace


Removing the screw over the PCI cover


The PCI cover comes off


Pulling off the brace


Removing the screws underneath, closest to the front left side foot


Those are for the HDD cage


Removing the screws for the two 2.5" drive mounts above the 5.25" bay


Mount pops off, simple and effective


Looking underneath the drive tray. Despite being screwed through the bottom of the chassis, there's some metalwork to hold it in place as well.


Sliding in my Seasonic power supply


Despite how the case looks, there's enough support for the power supply wihout even having its screws on. Any fears about having the PSU pull through and fall on your motherboard are unfounded.


Although, admittedly, the 1050W power supply is one of the longer units and as a result there's not much room in the rear for cabling and such. Using an optical drive in this project is unfeasible, although I wasn't planning on using one anyway.


This was my find on ebay. I found an auction for an Asus Maximus V GENE motherboard from seller wherecoolpplgo. He got me a great price and to my surprise the auction included everything that came with the motherboard brand new. I/O shield was mint, and it even included the fantastic mPCI-E and mSATA combination daughterboard which was completely unused. I am completely happy with this motherboard, and it was one of the consistently highest rated Z77 boards of all time at any size.


It's the return of the legendary i7-2700K. I can finally put my old workhorse back in action with a motherboard as good as it is.


Getting everything assembled, first the I/O shield goes in


There are two options for standoff locations for uATX boards, this was the location I needed to use (lower location)


Starting to put in the components


In goes the GTX 690


Testing with an Nvidia SLI bridge, the rear 80mm fan slot interferes with the alignment of the PCI cover holes. You would need to use a slim 80mm (not happening) in order to fit a rear fan.


Using the power supply externally to run the system and see what's up. I did breadboard the whole thing and confirm that it's working, but the temperatures are less than ideal due to both the extremely cramped internals, and the fact that I don't have a liquid cooler that fits. My cheap Corsair H50 that I got as a spare a few months ago doesn't fit properly in this configuration.


Attempting to stuff in the power supply...


It's an extremely tight fit. The location of the 2.5" bracket makes it fairly difficult to attach the middle-of-the-run SATA power connectors due to the passthrough nature of the rear of the plug. There's some vertical clearance issues.


Internal view of the chassis, I removed the SLI bridge and I'll leave the rear 80mm fan on there for now.


Here's the cover back on. The computer is all ready to go as is, even though the temperatures aren't what they should be. I'm currently running it at stock clocks (3.5GHz) with turbo disabled and temps are close to hitting 80°C. Not good but for now it'll do, I just have to figure out how to put my CPU underwater in this cramped cage.

To-Do list: mock up diagrams of available space...underneath the chassis minus GPU blockage, and also remove the front face and see where there's area to extend there

[aotsukisho]

Quick update due to my late photo editing of the first round of the SUGO-11 project. Second GTX 690 came in, and thus the graphics hardware is complete.


Here's the second one from a different seller.


Unfortunately this one has some kind of markings on it, looks like spots from something while in storage. I'm hoping it's not water


Another blurry photo of the spots. It continues all over the aluminum portions of the heatsink shroud.


Opening the SG-11 back up to fit in the second card.


Unfortunately when I stuck in the second card, I noticed that there were cracks on the plastic parts of the housing. Seriously?


Also noticed damage to the power connector. This one looks like it was knocked against something


Everything is hooked up to test


The SLI properly works, and I was able to run a Monster Hunter Online benchmark successfully. CPU is still locked at 3.5GHz no turbo, and I got a result of around 18k if I remember. Pretty good result considering my 980ti gets 28k and I'm not sure how well MHO scales with SLI much less a 4-way SLI which historically has been pretty bad.

Excited for the next step, which strangely is teardown and basically stripping the SG-11 down to its skeleton for some measurements and eventually modifying it.

[aotsukisho]

Sorry about the long time between updates, this PC is actually fully functional. I've been busy at work and haven't had time to update the build thread. Anyway, here we go...this session has the liquid cooler going in.


Looking at the layout, and figuring out exactly where would be the best place to mount a radiator. The 120mm fan and HDD racks go underneath the 5.25" bay, and as a result are just wide enough (125mm?) to accommodate the H60's radiator.


I thought about mounting it like this, but there's very little space for vertical air movement. I toyed with the idea of mounting the radiator on a sled that can be pulled out of the case, but that's both non-feasible and not a real solution.


The final decision was to mount it underneath the 5.25" bay, since I was going to use a fan controller that would leave the entirety of the bottom of the bay untouched.


Getting ready to saw the sheet metal


After some Dremel work. This metal is a lot more durable than it looks, it ate up nearly an entire heavy duty cutoff wheel to do this.


Using a dummy fan to get the markers to drill screw holes


Bottom hole wasn't able to be drilled for obvious reasons


Put a washer there so it doesn't deform the grill or the fan


Looking at it from the removed front panel view. I noticed that the chassis is still the same as from the original SUGO series, where the side fan was only 80mm and there were two 5.25" bays.


Putting in the NZXT Sentry fan controller


Front panel reattached. Unlike traditional cases, the front panel is nonpermeable for cooling purposes, and a pain in the ass to remove.


Perfect spacing behind the fan controller. I couldn't find a cleaner fan grill, and aesthetics aren't important when it's on the inside....right?


Looking at the rear of the case, where the rest of the parts still have to go back in.


Here's the intake fan that goes above the graphics cards. I figured, go big or go home. This is the (in)famous Vantec Tornado, rated for 84CFM but at a dizzyingly high 55dBA. I thought the noise could be mitigated by using the fan controller, but as it turns out I was sadly mistaken.


Using a Silverstone 80mm fan filter for good reason, with how much air this thing will blow I don't want it injecting dust all throughout the interior.


Underneath the bracket. The Tornado also has its power supplied straight from the Molex plugs from the power supply. No motherboard control, although it does provide the tachometer output so you can plug it into a header for monitoring.


Installing the motherboard back in


Mounting the H60 block to the CPU


Closeup view of the hoses, I don't think they're bent too badly although it is at an unconventional angle for sure.


Perfect curvature of the hoses means that it clears the RAM even with the tall heat spreaders.


Power supply and power cables all going back in


GTX 690s back in


Putting the side bracket back in


2.5" HDD tray replaced and the drives are hooked up


Sealed back up and ready for action.

I took the SUGO-11 to a lan party over one of the weekends, and it performed extremely well. Well enough to run most of my games with identical settings to my GTX 980ti equipped home pc, as it has about 80% of the power. There is a lot of heat buildup due to the fact that it's running quad GPUs, but other than that it's quite a compact gaming machine. I wouldn't have been disappointed if I went this route instead of going LGA2011v3 with that upgrade I did last year.

It started acting up near the end of the party however, so I was forced to do a reformat. I put Win10 on it which may be a bit new for the hardware but it's handling it just fine. The biggest hindrance to this system is the limited disk capacity, right now it's running a 240GB SSD with a 500GB HDD. I have to be picky with what I download again.

[aotsukisho]

I haven't had time to post updates on the PC until recently, so here we go.



Cracking open the case again


I got a more realistic fan for the primary intake, a server-class Delta FFB0812VHE. Lower CFM but much lower noise than the Tornado.


I also needed to rethink my hard drive mounting solution. This bracket from an old project was the perfect size...


Drilling some plexi from more old projects


You might be able to see what I had in mind


M3x12? screws through the mounting holes intended for a crossflow fan. A neoprene washer will provide vibration damping, spacing, and minor threadlock.


An external look at my handiwork


2.5" drives stacked up


With the power supply installed.

I ran the computer for a couple of weeks like this, the point of the drive relocation was intended to free up space above the radiator and fans to aid in airflow. It was alright for the short time it was configured like this, however I am aware that hard disk housings are not meant to be structurally load bearing so I have to think of another solution.

[aotsukisho]

Finishing up the configuration for the PC (for now).


This time I have to modify the SLI bridge, as I found that despite getting a thin 80mm fan for the rear it still contacts the bridge. I didn't have any hard 3-slot SLI bridges (the shortest available) either, the one to the left of the Nvidia one is a 4 slot that came with my Asrock motherboard.


The two screws underneath are the only ones you have to remove. The ones on the top are to remove the black plastic piece with the Nvidia logo in it, and the screws on the sides are to remove the black plastic accents.


Naked bridge installed on the 690s


Side view from the outside, very low profile


Getting ready to change the fan on my radiator


Replacing the two Bitfenix fans with a single San Ace 109R series.


I used spare motherboard standoffs as spacers so the radiator end tanks wouldn't interfere with mounting


Reusing the radiator grill to keep wires etc. from getting caught in the blades, also to slightly diffuse the airflow as it will be going straight into the bottom of the case


Finally getting around to changing the LED colors for the top button. Blue on blue is not the color scheme I was going for, and thus need to be swapped out.


Replaced the power LED with a 5mm red, and the HDD access with a 3mm white.


The 5mm LED's flat face pushes up against the plastic diffuser piece, holding it in place securely


I also wired up the case with some LED lighting, to be controlled by the NZXT Sentry


mpci-e wifi card installed


Putting everything back together.


CPU cooling side view of the lighting


GPU side view of the lighting in the dark

I haven't been able to hook up this PC to multimonitor yet so I'm not sure how much overclocking headroom I have. I'm thinking of cutting the front panel to put an intake fan there as well, both to provide some sort of forward to rear airflow and to dissipate the radiator heat rather than creating a hotspot on the bottom of the case. The fan controller at this point is not strictly necessary as I have removed the high current Tornado fan and can probably run the 80mm Delta fan off of 7v static. I will have to do more testing but once I get an idea of what the thermals are like I can make my next move.