Hep in deciding of getting SFF gaminic PC or not

[alinescoo]

At the moment I have a old i5 3350p, 8 GB RAM, Geforce 650 TI in a big ATX Antec case. When I've built this, I took a lot of attention in being silent, so I have a good PSU, good CPU cooler, case is also good at noise handling... but it's very big.

As the GPU is old, this is used for software development but.. I'd like to have an option to play games from time to time on my TV.

 

I've been thinking for quite a few months now about building a ITX build. Actually everything started with hearing about Intel Skull Canyon NUC which looked very good but from what I've read had some problems with acoustics and temperatures and also the price wasn't exactly cheap. After that I started looking into NUCs and saw that they have low TDP CPUs which offered lower perfomance vs desktop ones.

Looking at the ITX form factor, I tried looking at various cases, from ones like SG13, Metis, Node but really, they all look very big to me... maybe because of the way they are shown in reviews. And then, on most builds I saw, watercooling is used because the CPU doesn't have too much space to have proper cooling. Even so, there's a risk of high temperatures and noise. Initially I thought of a i5, maybe i5 7500, then thought of i7 7700, then Ryzen came and I waited to see what mITX board appear... On the GPU I think I am pretty decided to GTX 1060 6GB RAM. I also need 16 GB RAM and a m2 PCIE SSD. So in the end, I can't really say that I have found something that is small enough, maybe excepting the custom cases of over 150$...

 

Then I've looked at prebuild systems and they seem to somehow be a mix of both, compact but smaller than mITX. I see that Asus has G20, MSI has Trident 3 or Trident Arctic and a new very interesting addition Gigabyte Brix VR at only 2.6l.
I'm kind of drawn to Gigabyte because it has very compact size, a i7 7700HQ and a 1060GTX but probably it's a bit noisy and since it's barebone, adding RAM+SSD get's me to around the same price as Trident Actic which has a desktop 7700 and a 1070GTX. Corsair ONE is too expensive, AsRock Deskmini GTX sounds expensive and who knows when it will be released, Zotac Magnus with Ryzen looked interesting, but no news on when available or pricing... Did I miss any model?

 

Since I also need to run the Android emulator and plan on using Windows, I can only go on Intel route there's only support for HAXM.

 

So, is small, powerful and quiet possible but without using watercooling ?

[zzzzzzzhhh]

Yes, the Node 202 is actually quite quiet if you opt for a Noctua cooler, just post your budget and I'll see what I can do.

[alinescoo]

Node 202 is really big for my taste, I want a small cube or something, not a large hight one.  Look at that Gigabyte brix is 2.6l while node has ~10...

There is no fixed budget, just one to fit i7 7700 (or if intel releases Cofeelake I'll pick something similar priced if more cores), GTX 1060 6GB/Vega54 if the TDP is not skyhigh, a M2 256GB SSD only, no HDD (I have a NAS), no monitor or other peripherials and 16GB RAM, no watercooling.

 

Thank you

[hi mate]

so, are you looking for a custom pc or a prebuilt?

[alinescoo]

I don't know... I would like a custom one but I don't think I can manage to make one as good (small, cooler, silent) as a prebuilt one...