PrimeSonic

While I was hoping for AMD cards for better compatibility (last I checked, Nvidia was borked on ChimeraOS), I'm going to hold into these for reference. By the time I'm ready to start building, these issues are likely to be resolved. Solid choices all around given the crazy challenge that is working in one of the smallest cases you could fit a graphics card in. I'm marking the question solved but if you or anyone has some suggestions for low profile AMD cards that could fit this case and requirements, I'm open to ideas.

Looking over the photos, it does appear that the cooler still overhang the PCI brackets. For reference, the last GPU that I had in this case was an RTX 2080Ti Founder's. https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-GEFORCE-RTX-2080-Founders/dp/B07HWMDDMK Links just for reference but you can clearly see how the width of the card doesn't exceed the width of the PCI slots. Edit: for clarity, I'm referring to the thickness of the card, not how tall or long it is. That's good to know. I'll keep that in mind in case I need to fallback on my 2080Ti. But I would still much prefer to go up a generation if possible.

@PC HEROES Thanks for taking the time to dig into this. And you are right, this case is very tight to build in. I've built in it before and sadly had to transfer my personal rig into another case when I upgraded my GPU. Specifically I already tried cramming an RX-7900 XTX in there and it didn't go well. I'm afraid that while it advertises itself as a 2-slot card, the cooler actually juts out beyond the actual space allotted for the brackets. In practice, this is a 3-slot card (or 2 and a half) and it won't allow the case side panels to close once installed. Looking up the card you recommended, I see it's using the same reference design that I know from personal experience just won't fit in this tiniest case. If you can recommend a good 'low-profile' GPU that would awesome, even if it means taking a small dip in performance. Note this thing only really needs to out-perform a PS5. So it's not exactly a difficult bar to clear.

Hello folks, it's been a while. It's been some time since I've been neck-deep in PC hardware so I'm looking for some help planning this next build. Budget: Don't worry. You'll run into space and TDP constraints before budget constraints. Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Exclusively gaming Other details This will be the "living-room console PC" Must fit inside the A4-SFX by DAN Cases (https://www.dan-cases.com/dana4_spec.html) See link for specific space constraints Case already purchased, I'm repurposing it Will be running ChimeraOS (https://chimeraos.org/) AMD hardware strongly preferred due to better compatibility on this Linux distro Please refrain from arguing over the choice of OS Already have storage (1TB Samsung 980 PR) having a second m.2 slot to expand storage later would be a plus We have all the peripherals we need a motherboard with Bluetooth would a plus No rush to buy this year, doing planning only Would like to handle 4K@60, though up-scaling for more demanding titles would be fine Should be able to run FFXIV Online at target resolution and frame rate at high detail Microcenter preferred but online retailers OK (https://www.microcenter.com/)

Just throwing this out there since I've delved into the high end for so long I may have forgotten how to budget build. A friend needs a new PC. Budget is around $400 with a hard-cap at $500 (shipped). Thankfully, the hardware requirements aren't too crazy. Expected use cases are: GIMP and Photoshop for artwork Streaming said artwork Emulation of retro titles Streaming of said retro games HDDs are already available from an older machine for re-use (though if budget can allow for an SSD that would be awesome). All accessories and peripherals are still usable, so the budget is for tower only. The machine will be running some flavor of Linux so no need to budget for a Windows license or anything. Buying used could be an option as long as it doesn't bust the budget with shipping from too many vendors. Anyways, any suggestions would be helpful. I'll see how far I get with PcPartpicker myself but do chime in.

TL:DR - The impact that loop order has on temperatures is basically a rounding error. Don't worry about loop order. My advice from personal experience: Spend more time making sure your loop is easy to fill and drain, before you worry about inconsequential things like loop order.

My 2080 Ti has been working nicely since day 1. It's a Founders Edition. No, I'm not worried.

Oh yeah. I sent my 1440p away for repair. In the meantime, I had an equally sized 1080p monitor as a replacement. I tell you, I really missed having the extra pixels.

That's some crazy voltage. No wonder you were seeing those temps. Maybe it's time to pop the lid and get liquid metal in there. My old custom loop was pretty big for a CPU+GPU loop, having 120+240+360 radiators in there. The GPU was fine, but the CPU could always jump over 85C on stress tests. I knew the "thermal bottleneck" with the thermal compound between the CPU die and the IHS, but I never realized I would be getting over a 20 degree delta until I did it for myself. If you're going to push that much voltage in your CPU just to get to 4.6Ghz, sounds like you need all the cooling help you can get.

To me, that question is irrelevant since doing maintenance of a liquid metal application is a lot simplier and easier than doing maintenance on a custom water cooling loop. Even if the stuff needs to be replaced every other year, that's still a huge win. Heck, it might be even more irrelevant since by the time the stuff starts drying out and going bad, I could be ready upgrade the CPU anyways.

So for the time being, I've shelved my custom water cooling loop while I go air-cooled for a while. Since I was going from lots of radiator space for my CPU to just a Noctua NH-D15S, I wanted to give my CPU the best fighting chance it had to keep cool under my fairly aggressive overclock. It's an i7-6700K clocking at 4.6Ghz with voltage hovering around 1.375v. With the liquid metal, I never saw the CPU hit 60C even under load! I never got load temps like that even when I was pumping that heat through three separate radiators. I knew the cheap Intel TIM was the thermal bottleneck, but damn, I never really grasped just how much of a difference going with liquid metal would make. Eventually I'll come back to the liquid cooling space, maybe just for my GPU next time around. Right now though, I'm very happy with my CPU temps and will happily run this setup until the CPU or motherboard finally give up the silicon ghost.

That's why I picked a FE one. I intend on water cooling it later. Why bother with the fancy air cooler when I'll just be taking it off in favor of water cooling?

I totally understand. I had to be very picky about my settings since I was trying to maintain 100fps+ at 3440x1440 on a 980 Ti. It was doable, but there were settings that I had to tone down since it was a huge FPS drop for some barely noticeable visual flare. And in a game like this, getting fluid movement with high FPS is worth a lot more than pure visual spectacle. Hope you find the right balance soon.

I hate to say it, but this is normal. Heck, some scenes with water will tank FPS. My honest recommendation is to start dialing back some of the settings until you see at least 50% higher FPS than you want to target. WoW has huge fluctuations in the amount of stuff on screen and will see large FPS drops. In my back, I also made use of the separate graphics settings for raiding so that the extra visual noise didn't tank my FPS to unplayable numbers.

What graphics settings are you using on WoW? I know with certainty that there's lots of bells and whistles in those options that will absolutely tank FPS in certain scenes. While the usage graphs don't look like anything is bottle-necking anything else, if you're just cranking all settings to max and expecting 60fps in WoW, let me tell you, it's not going to happen.