Jonsbo VR1 ITX build

[TimT]

Hey all!

 

I only recently discovered Linus Tech Tips and have caught up on quite a lot over the past few weeks (including all seasons of scrapyard wars!) And decided to check out the forum - and seeing as I had to take the side off of my recent build anyway decided to take some photos and drop them here as a show off (and I guess provide a bit of review of the components and how they go together!)

 

Components (approx purchase price)

Case: Jonsbo VR1 ITX (£75)

Motherboard: Asrock Fatality AB350 Gaming-ITX/ac (£110)

CPU: Ryzen 1600 (£145)

GPU: Gigabyte Gaming 580X 8GB (£240)

RAM: Patriot Signature DDR4 2400MHz (£140)

PSU: BeQuiet Pure Power 10 500w 80+ Silver (Semi Modular) (£60)

SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 500Gb (£100 but from old build)

HDD: Toshiba P300 2Tb 7200Rpm (£56 but again from old build!)

(Total Price: £926)

 

So without saying any more here's some pictures!

 

 

So, for starters apologies that I didn't have any pictures of the hardware outside of the case! but a few notes:

Motherboard - I really like the smooth black PCB on this! Otherwise its a pretty functional motherboard with all the features I wanted (including a built in wifi/BT card, which I really wanted to connect my Xbox One controller without an added dongle.) I haven't tried any overclocking with it, but from what I've read I should be able to get something more out of the processor if I was to try.

Ram - I pretty much bought this because it was about the cheapest single card 16gb ddr4 ram I could find, and the picture was a standard green ram stick but when it showed up the PCB was actually black which obviously matched the mobo and was a pleasant surprise

PSU - This is the first time I have bought from BeQuiet and I am pleased so far, it's semi-modular and the fixed cables have okay if unexceptional black nylon sleeves, the modular cables are all flat which would potentially help with management in a different case (more on that in a bit) 

Graphics card - I bought this RX 580 at a lucky time and got it at RRP in anticipation of a build, but when I stuck in in an old build it didn't output anything! Though I do have to say that I ordered through Scan and the RMA has pretty painless and it came back working (but now for some reason the fans are always at 100% which is a real shame for this build as I wanted it to be pretty quiet!) I'm thinking I may just live with it until I can afford to upgrade as it only really just manages ultra graphics in some games at 3440x1440 (definitely not at 60FPS anyway.) Hopefully with the 11 series cards from NVidia (and with any luck a bit better competition from AMD) 1080 or 1080TI prices may come down enough over the next year for me to make the jump

CPU - Well I'm pretty pleased with it! My old rig was running an FX9590 so having more power and more cores at 65w TDP is a blessing.

Case - And here we are, I saw this case on Ebay in Feb and instantly decided I was buying it and going ITX rather than mATX. And I have not been disappointed! The case is beautiful, it looks like a piece of high end audio equipment, and would sit beautifully in a living room as a HTPC or gaming rig. The tempered glass is heavily tinted meaning as there is a lack of lights in my machine it is very difficult to see inside (in fact the second to last picture is showing the only RGB light in the whole system (the Gigabyte logo on the graphics card!)

 

It was surprisingly easy to build in considering the small size, though did require some careful thought and occasionally pulling something out to put something else in first (I switched between motherboard first and PSU first a few times I think, definitely should be motherboard first!) But it does lead to the most annoying thing about this case - which is the almost complete lack of places to hide cables. There are a few zip-tie points on the back of the front panel which are handy, but as almost all cables are going to the motherboard you inventively really want to have tie points along the top or bottom to go around the edge, unfortunately the best you can really do is shove them down the sides. This leads to having a bit of a rats nest at the front of the PSU, meaning I really would not recommend anything but a modular or semi-modular power supply for this case. The hard drives and SSDs are mounted using rubber feet which slide into pre-cut slots on the back of the front panel, which works quite well, and allow for up to 1x3.5" and 2x2.5" or 3x2.5" drives, I think I would really recommend sticking to only 2.5" drives if possible. 

 

The case came with two 120mm fans, one at the top and one at the bottom, the included fans actually seem relatively decent and have black nylon sleeves on the cables which at least for this match the sleeve on the PSU cables. The top fan slot actually has mounting holes drilled for a 140mm fan as well but there is only about 20mm between the bottom of the fan and the stock wraith cooler that came with the ryzen so if you were considering a bigger air cooler be careful with the height of the fan. 

 

Overall I'm very happy with the build, but I actually really wish the vr1 was about an inch wider and deeper so that they could fit some more cable management space at the sides and potentially behind the motherboard, although it is already a pretty big case for an ITX case so I understand why they didn't. It's also a fingerprint magnet like no other, even the black brushed black metal on the non glass sides seems to show every fingerprint! But having said that I absolutely love this case, and plan to stick with it for a long time!

 

Next steps

So like with any good personal rig I already have plans for what I would like to do next and have formulated multiple plans:

• RGB Lighting - The Asrock motherboard has an RGB header and I'd like to get a few strips in there just so you can actually see in! At the moment the glass is so dark it completely hides the hardware, I think just enough light to illuminate the insides would be nice
• Memory - I don't currently have an NVMe SSD but there is a slot on the back of the motherboard for one so it would be nice to get that boost for the boot drive, I'd also like to replace my current 2Tb dump drive for a 2.5" 2Tb hybrid SSD so that it would work slightly better as a Steam library drive on a budget. Also speaking of memory a matching stick of the patriot for a cool 32Gb of ram wouldn't hurt
• Custom water cooling loop - Because of the large size of the case, there is actually plenty of space for a pump/reservoir, I'm currently thinking that if I could replace the 3.5"drive with a 2.5" then I could mount a pump/reservoir combo where the 3.5" drive is currently. Technically I could fit both a 120mm and 140mm radiator with the current mounting points assuming any graphics card wasn't any longer than my current one and had a side power connector rather than off the end. The general idea being that eventually I could plumb both a CPU and GPU block into the loop.

 

That's all! if you made it to the end, thanks for reading I hope you found it interesting at least!