MI11 - A Mini-ITX Build

[Daegun]

I'm not creative in the slightest, so I decided to just go with a name that meant something instead of something cool. M(ini) I(TX) (build) 1 (mark) 1 or MI11.

So after having my behemoth of a computer for two years, I decided I wanted something a little smaller than my current build. I was always interested in Mini-ITX computers so I settled on building as small a computer as possible without sacrificing the power I had in my current build. I finally started planning the build before black friday, so I could take advantage of the deals. My budget was originally wanting to stay below $750 with an absolute maximum limit of $1000. I don't even think I have to say that the $750 was pretty damn impossible, and I barely made it under $1000. The good news is that it can probably run Crysis.


The goods:

Case: EVGA Hadron Air
CPU: Intel 4690k
Motherboard: MSI Z87I
RAM: G.Skill Sniper 1866mhz 2x4gb
Storage: 1 x 240gb OCZ Vertex 460, 1 x 1tb Seagate Barracuda
CPU Cooler: CM Hyper TX3, 2 x Noctua NF-B9 redux 92mm pwm fan
GPU: MSI Twin Frozr R9 290
Other: 2 x Noctua NF-S12B redux 120mm pwm fan, 2 x pwm fan splitter (not here yet)
Total Cost: $959

I had to wait a little while after I ordered the parts until I could build it, and once I could, I was like a kid in a candy store with how excited I was. The downside is that while I had planned a lot of this out, I hadn't done quite enough of it, especially in relation to the graphics card. This case also single-handedly managed to make me hate mini-itx cases in a single night. While I love the look of them once they're done, especially with the size, I will never look forward to doing one this small again.

I started opening up the boxes to assemble it and saw this.

Stock CPU cooler. Kill it with fire!

So if you don't know, this case has few peculiarities, one of them being that there isnt an open hole behind the motherboard, which means you have to mount your cpu cooler before you put it in the case. That and there wouldn't be enough room to get at it inside the case anyways. And since mine hangs over one of the RAM slots, this means I pretty much have to put half the computer together outside the case.

That RAM clearance.

So I did all this and got it in the case before I realized, 'You idiot. You haven't put the graphics card in yet.' Now that may sound a little odd, but that's because I decided to do something you generally shouldn't. The official supported card length according to EVGA is 267mm. Well I already had MSI's 290 and wanted to use it in the case but it's 276mm, and I had seen someone who had gotten a PowerColor 290 in their Hadron, which is 287mm through, bending the tabs out of the way, then back into place. I didn't want to mod the case, yet at least, so I came up with the brilliant (read: stupid) idea of put the graphics card in the case first and then working around it until it was time to install that as well. And this is where a lot of the poor planning came into play. This turned a case where cable managment was already a problem, into a veritable nightmare and I ended up having to use tweezers to get at half the wires. I had to remove the motherboard yet again to route cables around the case before I put it back in, or things simply wouldnt work out.

Still waiting on gmail for the pictures I mailed to myself.

After a little bit of fighting it though, I got things where they were supposed to be.

Temps arent bad so far, with the CPU idling around 29-31C and the GPU at 40-41C.
Take note though, the build isn't finished. Things left to do are plasti-dip the fans and top of the heatsink, drill out the hard drive cage, and sleeve all the wires (and put in the fan splitters I forgot to get). This will have to wait about a week for all the supplies to arrive.

Thought I'd add this in just to show why exactly I wanted to do a mini-itx build. My other case is in an Antec P280...

Any advice, feedback, or criticisms are welcome. I want to hear what I did wrong or could do better and what you all think about it.

[antoainb]

Nice!

[Antibull]

So beautiful <3 

[dbcooper]

Beautiful case!

 

Is the PSU noisy? Some people say that it makes an awfull high pitched noise, thats why i didnt buy that case.. 

[Daegun]

Beautiful case!

 

Is the PSU noisy? Some people say that it makes an awfull high pitched noise, thats why i didnt buy that case.. 

It's actually pretty quiet, to me at least. The noctua fans I have at the top of the case are just running at a solid 1200 rpm at the moment and they're quite a bit louder than the psu fan. That being said, if you were going for a silent build, you would probably want to replace it with a quieter fan.

[ELSknutson]

I'm not creative in the slightest, so I decided to just go with a name that meant something instead of something cool. M(ini) I(TX) (build) 1 (mark) 1 or MI11.

So after having my behemoth of a computer for two years, I decided I wanted something a little smaller than my current build. I was always interested in Mini-ITX computers so I settled on building as small a computer as possible without sacrificing the power I had in my current build. I finally started planning the build before black friday, so I could take advantage of the deals. My budget was originally wanting to stay below $750 with an absolute maximum limit of $1000. I don't even think I have to say that the $750 was pretty damn impossible, and I barely made it under $1000. The good news is that it can probably run Crysis.

The goods:

IMG_20141214_115730.jpgIMG_20141214_145658.jpgIMG_20141214_125654.jpg

Case: EVGA Hadron Air

CPU: Intel 4690k

Motherboard: MSI Z87I

RAM: G.Skill Sniper 1866mhz 2x4gb

Storage: 1 x 240gb OCZ Vertex 460, 1 x 1tb Seagate Barracuda

CPU Cooler: CM Hyper TX3, 2 x Noctua NF-B9 redux 92mm pwm fan

GPU: MSI Twin Frozr R9 290

Other: 2 x Noctua NF-S12B redux 120mm pwm fan, 2 x pwm fan splitter (not here yet)

Total Cost: $959

I had to wait a little while after I ordered the parts until I could build it, and once I could, I was like a kid in a candy store with how excited I was. The downside is that while I had planned a lot of this out, I hadn't done quite enough of it, especially in relation to the graphics card. This case also single-handedly managed to make me hate mini-itx cases in a single night. While I love the look of them once they're done, especially with the size, I will never look forward to doing one this small again.

I started opening up the boxes to assemble it and saw this.

IMG_20141214_144633.jpg

Stock CPU cooler. Kill it with fire!

So if you don't know, this case has few peculiarities, one of them being that there isnt an open hole behind the motherboard, which means you have to mount your cpu cooler before you put it in the case. That and there wouldn't be enough room to get at it inside the case anyways. And since mine hangs over one of the RAM slots, this means I pretty much have to put half the computer together outside the case.

IMG_20141214_154628.jpgIMG_20141214_154652.jpg

That RAM clearance.

So I did all this and got it in the case before I realized, 'You idiot. You haven't put the graphics card in yet.' Now that may sound a little odd, but that's because I decided to do something you generally shouldn't. The official supported card length according to EVGA is 267mm. Well I already had MSI's 290 and wanted to use it in the case but it's 276mm, and I had seen someone who had gotten a PowerColor 290 in their Hadron, which is 287mm through, bending the tabs out of the way, then back into place. I didn't want to mod the case, yet at least, so I came up with the brilliant (read: stupid) idea of put the graphics card in the case first and then working around it until it was time to install that as well. And this is where a lot of the poor planning came into play. This turned a case where cable managment was already a problem, into a veritable nightmare and I ended up having to use tweezers to get at half the wires. I had to remove the motherboard yet again to route cables around the case before I put it back in, or things simply wouldnt work out.

Still waiting on gmail for the pictures I mailed to myself.

After a little bit of fighting it though, I got things where they were supposed to be.

IMG_20141214_201923.jpg

Temps arent bad so far, with the CPU idling around 29-31C and the GPU at 40-41C.

Take note though, the build isn't finished. Things left to do are plasti-dip the fans and top of the heatsink, drill out the hard drive cage, and sleeve all the wires (and put in the fan splitters I forgot to get). This will have to wait about a week for all the supplies to arrive.

Thought I'd add this in just to show why exactly I wanted to do a mini-itx build. My other case is in an Antec P280...

IMG_20141214_204749.jpg

Any advice, feedback, or criticisms are welcome. I want to hear what I did wrong or could do better and what you all think about it.

it might be cool can you take some better pictures

[Daegun]

it might be cool can you take some better pictures

I'll do that. I was worried how they would look, only had a phone to take the pictures at the time.

[don]

Nice build, what are the gpu and cpu temps.

[Daegun]

Nice build, what are the gpu and cpu temps.

 

Ran prime95 and furmark to stress both at the same time so I could get a worst case scenario and things were pretty much at the limit of where you would want to go. The CPU got up to 86C at the highest, and the GPU got to 94C.

 

Edit: Re-running tests. Found out that one of the case fans wasn't running when I was doing that.

 

Edit 2: Getting the fan running again didn't help much. The change was practically non-existant. It was the one over the hard drive cage too, so that might be why.

[don]

Cool.

[d33g33]

Am also in the process of a tight mITX build, very nice!

[Daegun]

Am also in the process of a tight mITX build, very nice!

Thank you.

I saw that, it's looking awesome so far. Gonna be a really powerful, small build with that 980 in there. And I have to say that I'm really jealous of that keyboard.

[d33g33]

Thank you.

I saw that, it's looking awesome so far. Gonna be a really powerful, small build with that 980 in there. And I have to say that I'm really jealous of that keyboard.

Heat is a massive concern, that and I think the GPU is too wide/tall to fit in the case.

 

Custom loop is going to be a bitch.

[Daegun]

Heat is a massive concern, that and I think the GPU is too wide/tall to fit in the case.

 

Custom loop is going to be a bitch.

The heat is a huge concern for me. I've had the 290 hit 95C before when in crossfire, so I'm fine (not happy but fine) with that, but coming from the Phenom II series where you can't get past 60C stable, I was on edge the moment the cpu hit 80C.

You're choosing probably the easier, cleaner way to do this lol. I'm gonna be removing the hard drive cage and I saw a mod of this case where they cut out a spot for a fan on the back, and I'm seriously considering doing it to get these temps down. I knew it would be high going in, but this is still pretty crazy.

[Daegun]

First update since I started this and it took quite a while. I finished this weeks ago but wanted to see just how much the changes helped and had to fight off problems with windows 10 and the motherboard's shenanigans. Though I failed and ended up having to reinstall windows 10, thank god for backups. I also had trouble debating whether to post this or not as what was going to be such a nice build became really REALLY ghetto, and not like mounting SSDs with velcro, much worse than that.

 

So first things first, more changed than I thought it would because of my quest to lower temps on my graphics card and it worked out splendidly. I kind of managed to keep the price under $1000 still, but some things have been added and removed.

 

Things that were removed: 1Tb hard drive (I'll get into why later)

 

Things added:

Kraken G10 and kraken X31 water cooler.

 

I had a wonderful idea, that wasn't really an idea and wasn't really wonderful, it was more a lazy wish. 'So the reason my gpu runs so hot and heats up my cpu is because it dumps all that really hot air it cools itself with into the case. I really wish I could just move all the hot air outside the case.' And then I saw a guide by Faceman. This guide was actually wonderful, unlike my lazy wish. It was a guide on how to watercool your cpu and gpu for under $200, and it showed the g10 and how to use a cpu cooler to cool your gpu and I realized I had found my solution.

 

So I set out to make this solution work, and it turns out that my desire to remove the hard drive cage was on point, because to fit the water cooler in I would need to get the drive cage out of the way. Luckily this was pretty simple, there are 13 rivets that you drill out and you're good. The only part that was a little complicated was removing the front panel of the case to get at 8 of them.

The first 3 rivets that I removed.

 

This is what the front looks like after you remove the front panel. The rivets are the parts that look like holes, 4 in the middle and 4 on the right side.

 

And this is what made it difficult to remove the front panel. What you see is adhesive slathered all over the back of the front panel to the case, to remove it I had to be very careful and slide a paint knife between the front panel and the case to gently pry it off. Very gently because it's flimsy and breaks easily.

 

Here you can see the case after the drive cage has been removed, a lot more room in there now, perfect for getting this water cooler in.

 

With that job finished, I moved on to removing the Twin Frozr cooler from my R9 290 and putting the G10 and X31 on it. (I was actually sad about this, the card looks a lot better with the Twin Frozr on it than the G10)

 

It pained me to do this.

 

Backplate over a backplate? Seems fine to me. (and here's where things start get a little bit off)

 

Getting this on was a bit of a challenge to say the least. The G10 supports the reference 290 pcb, but msi changed theirs a little. This little difference made it really hard to get the g10 to screw on properly. You can't see it in the picture but every one of the screws that holds the G10 on is angled and none of the caps at the end sit flush against it.

 

Now before I go any further, I would like to remind everyone that the Hadron Air doesn't support water cooling of any kind. IT. DOES. NOT. SUPPORT. IT. Of course, I didn't keep this in mind, and when I finally remembered, I thought, 'Eh, what the hell, I've already come this far, and long graphics cards weren't supported either.' <- Do not do this, it usually doesn't end well.

 

So I decided to continue on with my endeavor. The first thing I noticed was that the way the radiator had to fit in for the screw holes to line up wouldn't work because it was too long, and the other fan would get in the way. So I tried to figure out a way to fit it in sideways and discovered that the length of the X31's radiator was perfect to literally snap into place in the top of the case, and no, it's not supposed to do that. So I put velcro on the back side to keep it from slipping and I snapped the other side in. Perfect.

 

Then I discovered that the fan got in the way of the RAM on the motherboard, so the motherboard couldnt fit in the case. And this couldn't be, the radiator had to go in the case first, there was no way to get it in after the motherboard was in. So with a heavy heart, I grabbed a pair of plastic side cutters and shaved quite a bit of the corner off of one of my noctua fans.

 

After going through another complex, puzzle-like way of putting all the pieces back into my computer, I moved onto putting my ssd and hdd in and I ran into a huge problem. The hdd was too big, not to fit in the case, but to fit in the case and allow me to get my hands in to position it and move cables. I tried different ways of plugging cables in and velcroing things down unsuccessfully for an hour, but I eventually had to admit defeat, as it wasn't something the case would allow me to do. So I ended up plugging in just the SSD. Of all the things to not work in this case, this definitely wasn't the thing I thought would go wrong.

 

Here it is, all finished up. A reguler shot to show you what it looks like to me, and a shot with flash on to expose the terrible cable management that I'm still working on a way to clean up.

 

 

The results? Beyond my wildest dreams. Gpu load temps dropped over 20C and cpu load temps dropped about 15C. I went from playing Skyrim with gpu maxed at 100% at 74C to 51C. Benchmarking was the same, dropped from being pinned at 95C to 74C. Benchmarking the cpu with the gpu running went from over 85C down to 72C. I was ecstatic about this because it meant that I could finally start overclocking things. (I havent yet though, had too many problems so far)

 

 

The next step is to overclock my gpu and cpu now that the heat isnt killing them, and then eventually sleeve cables.

 

Sorry for the crappy pictures and thank you for taking the time to read this long, slightly over-dramatized post.

[wolfgang]

I didnt realize you were still working on this. Doesn't look bad to me but have you tried to put the side back on with those hoses?

[Daegun]

I didnt realize you were still working on this. Doesn't look bad to me but have you tried to put the side back on with those hoses?

Took a long time to get off my butt and post this lol. Yes I have, there's some space between the card and the lip that the tubes are resting on, theyre essentially in the same position but on the inside of the case. I'll take a picture and post it later.

[Mrafki1]

hows the cpu cooler 

[Daegun]

hows the cpu cooler

Honestly not the best, but it fits and leaves a little bit of room to OC, and that's exactly what I wanted.

[Mrafki1]

Temps and sound?

[Daegun]

Temps and sound?

Temps get to 72C under full load for several hours, and idles under 40C, usually between 36-38C.

I don't have anything to measure sound with, but my personal opinion is that it isn't too bad. It isn't the loudest thing in my case, so I don't pay much attention to it. That is after replacing the fan though.

[Mrafki1]

Damn that't a bit too much for me but it looks great and sleek nice job man

[Analog]

Very cool little build, I really like the Hadron Air, hope EVGA make a M-ATX version of this case. What I didn't understand is, is this your primary PC now or is it just a small form factor one for when you are on the road?