16 cores, very SFF: Velka 7

dLife_dt · May 14, 2022

I wanted to write this up for the few people like me who need an sff PC with many cores and casual gaming and drone video editing...

And in the process, push back a bit on everyone saying SFF or 120mm AIO is horrid for high-power chips.

I'd been eying the 6L Velka 7 every since Linus Velka 3 video, and (PCIE cable aside) this case is a joy to build. Within these constraints, I settled for a 3950x, 32gb RAM, ASRock B550, and 2x1TB NVMEs on the MB.

As <47mm of air cooling wasn't gonna cut it, I set up a 120mm ML120L AIO and a Noctua 120x15mm slim fan next to the EVGA 6gb GTX 1060.
Technically the case is 1cm too short to accommodate both of these, but with a trim to the GPU cover and the fan frame, things jive well.

[in that 1cm of overlap, the layering goes: 5mm of GPU board - 12mm of (trimmed) fan frame - 27mm of radiator - case wall]

Oh and I installed the PSU "upside-down" so the AIO fan blows not into a wall but into the PSU (and sometimes helped by the PSU fan).

In the end result, thermals under all-core loads limit the CPU to 4.1ghz @75C (in 23C ambient). Compared to the best-case scenario of 4.3Ghz, I'm only losing like 0.75 cores of performance. As a bonus I can tell laypeople I keep 16 computers in a lunchbox and play Cyberpunk. Even though it only gets a narrow niche of math problems between pencil-and-paper and the HPC cluster with its unpredictable queue line.