Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today i have a build video i built a few new pcs this year but i don't believe i've built a single mini ITX rig which i have to say is a real surprise as they're usually my favorite to put together mini ITX builds usually throught a few challenges which makes the process a little more enjoyable at least it does in my opinion they also look great and cramming a high-end desktop build into a compact case well that just never gets old the purpose of today's build is to upgrade my wife's computer she's a graphic designer slash photographer and she does a lot of work with magazine layouts so this means she spends a lot of time in adobe indesign and of course uses Photoshop as well after a minute I have kind of neglected to keep her computer up-to-date over the years though having said that she's been pretty happy with the setup that she's had up until now it's done pretty much everything she's needed to do it's just started to run into some problems recently and every time I've offered previously to upgrade it she said it's fine don't bother now though it is time to bother so we've pulled the old system apart which is in the Thermaltake suppressor f1 as you can see it's pretty well being gutted now and that did have a core i5 46 70 K CPU I don't know if it was overclocked I honestly can't recall and that was on the asrock z87 II ITX motherboard so that's obviously still in there I had 16 gigabytes of memory ddr3 memory and it had a fairly underwhelming radeon r7 250 graphics card but that's all she needed for the work that she was doing in the last month or so though the old Haswell quad core rig has started running out of memory and this has caused issues with InDesign there's really no cost-effective option to solve the RAM capacity issue because as you just saw the Mini ITX board only has two slots so we'd have to ditch the 16 we've gotten try and find a 32 gigabyte kit definitely not worth the hassle so about a month ago I decided to quickly hack together a Rison 7 test bill with 32 gigabytes of ddr4 memory to see how that played with the Adobe software she was using the upgrade was significant and very noticeable in design layouts would work at the resolution and there's no stuttering or slowdown when scrolling through the pages Photoshop was also noticeably better working with high-resolution RAW images was smooth and the Rison 7 system never complained about the workload so with that successful test run complete it was time to build the new workhorse it was strongly suggested to me that I stick with a mini ITX system she wants to keep it on her desk but doesn't want it to take up too much room she was very happy with the suppressor f1 that she had hi it wasn't an issue here the only requirement was a small footprint so this afforded me the opportunity to finally create a built-in e fantex evolve shift for this one I'm yet again sticking with asrock this time using their new fatality a be 350 gaming ITX AC my favorite mini ITX a m4 motherboard then coming to the rescue and solving the memory issue is team group with their team t force Vulcan and 32 gigabyte ddr4 2,400 memory kit ideally I would have liked a higher clocked memory kit for this build but capacity was the main concern I really needed to vi thinking about sticks and it's possible with some cheating that you can get more out of this memory and I played around in the BIOS and was able to get this memory running at ddr4 3000 speeds simply by loading the XMP profile and then upping the frequency while leaving the timings the same so you are overclocking the memory your mileage may vary but this memory did seem to overclock very well moving on powering the build i have the silverstone sx 650 g a compact sfx power supply with a be 650 watt output it also has an 80 plus gold certification and a fully modular design so it's perfect for this mini ITX build I was pretty keen to get started with the build of so much so that I rushed the planning stage and well that turned out to be a bit of a mistake for a few reasons not a disaster but a few things did go wrong my first error was requesting the fan tech speed HTC 12 LS for the build it's a great little cooler but I ran into not one but two problems right off the bat the second of which I will get to in a moment but that one proved fatal for the coolers inclusion the first issue that I ran into was actually the lack of a m4 support so that should have been an obvious one and cooller hasn't been updated to offer support either I told you my complete lack of planning backfired on this one anyway I did work around this issue with the help of two small washers which I used to jerry-rig the cooler to the hem for socket and this worked surprisingly well I was able to create even pressure for a perfectly flush connection with the CPUs heat spreader thermals were good that was until I decided to install the glass panel on the side of the case for my final testing and I realized that the 120 millimeter fan had about 4 millimeters of breathing room between and the glass so that kind of limited how efficient the fan was and thermals did rise a bit it was still manageable but you wouldn't have been at overclock the way it was set up and it just didn't really make that much sense it looked cool but didn't make that much sense again how I planned the build this issue probably would have been spotted ahead of time anyway I've never worked with the fan tax of old shift before so this entire build was a bit of a learning process or rather learners you go process which probably isn't the best way to do it it's the way I did it this time I knew the case was designed to take advantage of all in one liquid coolers and I thought well I'll chuck in Vegas 64 and really see what it can do and then use this air cool of it that's obviously backfired and didn't work out you can install a pair of 120 millimeter radiators it's possible put one in the bottom like I have here and then one in the front but it's very tight you have to sort of orientate them in a specific way and it's just it's very crammed I didn't like it so I decided to ditch that I also has a bit concerned about thermals and since I'm not going with a Vegas 64 liquid card in this for my wife I decided to just pull that out I'm not going with the Titan X either but that's sort of beside the point kind of anyway that's how its configured for now truth be told though the system really doesn't require that much 3d rendering power so the Pascal Titan X is obviously overkill for this build and I will go for something maybe like a GTX 1060 will find its way into the final build now with the 120 millimeter rad spot freed up I grabbed the cooler master master liquid 120 and relocated the jazzy looking Corsair ll 120 fan and I've got that rotating between orange and red and that looks pretty cool all up I would have to say if I'm being honest I built this system probably about four times or at least the majority of it shuffling things around a cable management took a bit of messing about and of course I changed quite a few components from the original configuration so yeah quite a lot of work went into building it but had a lot of fun doing it and yeah although it was probably the worst planned build I've done this year I did have a lot of fun it was probably one of my most fun builds actually of the year I enjoyed it sort of tuning it and tweaking it and getting it a little bit better each time I did it and working out working at the best way to build in the shift it was just a lot of fun I know I probably need to get out more anyway now that's complete I decided to run a few temperature tests and I've left the front 140 millimeter fan that's exhausting air at the front I can feel it blowing all the air out so I've left that exhausting and then we've got the 120 millimeter fan in the bottom and that's pushing air out through the radiator so basically both fans are sucking air out of the case they're both exhaust fans and they're the only fans that we have in the system and then they'll be sucking you know the air that they're pushing out will be drawn in through the ventilation here so hopefully that works pretty well I have to say I'm a little concerned it does have very well appear step very limited airflow only those two fans of course each side panel is non-ventilated because they are temporary glass panels and doesn't a pin that would be a whole lot of airflow over the motherboard vrm area not too worried about the graphics card on the other side that should pretty well take care of itself but anyway we'll jump into the temperature results and see what's what first up I ran the Ida stress test stressing both the CPU and FPU and here are the results out of the box so that is to say these stock operating clock speeds the horizon 7 1700 X maxed out at just 59 degrees while the motherboards verum heatsink reached 62 degrees I used a thermal probe to measure the underside of the heatsink and reported the maximum temperature after the hour-long stress test and for anyone wondering for all of these tests I did have an ambient room temperature of 21 degrees overclocking the 1700 X to 3.9 gigahertz which is the maximum frequency I banaue to achieve with the CP on any motherboard 10 preachers did saw to a very warm 82 degrees still this is a very safe operating temperature so no problems there the vrm heatsink picked at 71 degrees which is also very safe for the most part you're not going to be stressing the CPU as hard as the Ida 64 stress test so what can you expect when gaming for this test I used Battlefield one and recorded the temperature over an hour of gameplay although the CPU isn't working as hard the Titan X is now pumping out heat a lot of heat though most of it is forced at the top of the fan Tex case thankfully a few things worth noting the Titan X basically targets 84 degrees under load the fans spin up at whatever speed is required to maintain a thermal limit of 84 degrees and when the fans are maxed out you will start to see the GPU throttle in order to maintain an 84 degree temperature so even on an open test bed the card will quickly hit 84 degrees and then maintain that temperature under load I should also note the Titan wasn't overclocked in either of these tests just the rise in seven CPU is overclocked and finally the Titan X was surprising quite as the fan speed max tell it just 2400 rpm so as you can see when gaming despite the Titan X now pumping out quite a lot of heat the CPU and motherboard actually ran cooler as they're not being stressed as heavily as they were in the previous tests in summary the operating temperatures when gaming are very impressive and the system was also very quiet only the Titan X could be heard when gaming and even then it wasn't particularly loud overall I'm very impressed with how this builds turned out and it's just occurred to me that this is actually the first ever and I mean first ever AMD powered mini ITX system that I've personally built I don't think I ever slapped together an FM 2 mini ITX system and pretty certain I never built an a m1 rig so this is probably I'm fairly certain my first ever AMD Mini ITX build that I've had the pleasure of putting together the only item I would change in this build if I was buying it or making it for myself and I'm assuming gaming's on the table here maybe a home theater PC gaming or something along those lines I would go for probably a GeForce GTX 1080 that would be a really nice fit really good for 1440p gaming and a complement this really well so with the Rison 7:17 hundred X 32 gigabytes of ddr4 memory a samsung 960 pro 512 gigabyte SSD and the gtx 1080 plus all the other stuff such as the silverstone psu the asrock mini ITX motherboard and of course the fantex shift case you're looking at about $2,000 us all up considering what you get for that money this in my opinion is an exceptional rig 1440p or 144 hertz gaming won't be an issue nor will serious productivity work it's really a jack-of-all-trades and it takes up just a hundred and seventy by two hundred and seventy four millimeters of desk space it's also quite and allows for very reasonable operating temperatures especially for a case that's allowed that in tempered glass I love it and I hope you guys enjoyed the build video that's going to do it for this one I'm your host Steve catch again next time