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Building a TOWERING ITX Gaming System w/ Coffee Lake!

2017-10-18
well hello good people hope you having a fantastic day so in that little introductory montage I'm excited to share this process with you because I'm about to build an ITX gaming station with the Z 370 I gaming motherboard for my soos a coffee League CPU and a chassis that I've been very excited to finally open up and build inside of it if the shift X from fantex so will come along this should be a fun one let's begin right after this Wow is this yours it sure is but how hue hue hue hue hue hue it pays off to stay loyal ends xtq plus now available in black or white lighting up my air RGB fans to complement the crack and cooler all inside the beautiful Mantha ITX NZXT bring all those colorful dreams together test your own imagination links for parts in the description below alright so welcome to our first coffee like gaming build that I'm going to try to pimp out as much as possible and actually give this whole two systems in one space a shot with my rising 7 build for video editing and rendering and this coffee like built strictly for gaming the case of choice is the fantasy evolved shift X this whole vertical structure is still unusual to me especially because it's 66 centimeters in height and proportions just look way off especially when it's standing right next to the smaller evolve shift and so make sure to check out that review if you're interested but what's really cool about the larger shift X is compatibility of up to 280 millimeter all-in-one or a radiator inside the case and that's going to be needed for best cooling and silence I am using the kraken X 62 because of the slimmer tubing gorgeous ring illumination and also adding these cable male or sleeving to complement the lighter color scheme that I'm going for so I am both excited and kind of nervous of using the shift X because I've really never had anything this tall on my desk and it's also quite slim so it's almost like a little scratch paper but the thing is despite the feet being kind of relatively stable the thing does wobble a bit and I'm hoping that once I populate the system in there it will become heavy enough that you know it doesn't make me worried of like slightly tipping it over because like this out buying very little bit of pressure and it does wobble no because of the table but because of the feet and one of the coolest things about the case in my opinion would be the whole see-through nature so glass on both sides that means that regardless of what you populate in there you really have to put in the time and effort to make it look good otherwise you know regardless of what you put in there everything is visible and the glass is not it's tinted but doesn't have any color cast which is awesome and it's not like super tinted so you can actually see through and yeah it's the incentive for you to do a good job the case supports ATX power supplies thanks to that larger bottom chamber but to keep the shroud to help with kale management so instead we've got an SFX L power supply that is fully modular and I'm using the white sleeved extensions as well to keep things in character and to illuminate the interior because this is a fantasy enclosure it kind of made sense to use these halos Lux RGB fan frames that connect directly to the lighting of the case so no additional hardware is required for lighting control and I really like the subtle fan illumination that should spill some color onto the rest of the hardware on the inside now this is an ITX system so we've got an issue z 370 I giving them on the board the color scheme here is perfect but I'm very happy with a feature set like three four pin fan headers dual em that two slots one of which is below this heatsink and the other is on the backside of the motherboard there's a front panel USB 3.1 gen2 connector unfortunately I will not be using since the case does not have that and the rest of the i/o is equipped with AC Wi-Fi really good audio ports a bunch of more USBs and Gigabit LAN the processor of choice is the i5 8600 k it's a six core six thread cpu so the lack of multi-threading is not ideal for video production which is why I'm allocating this build for gaming only for memory we've got the new Corsair Vengeance RGB in white it's only a 16 gigabyte kit but it's super fast at 3600 megahertz and for gaming 16 gigabytes is plenty and for the graphics card I actually took out the GTX 980 for the win Edition out of my Rison workstation and will use this in a coffee like build because the color scheme matches perfectly with the motherboard and I'll just pop in the gtx 1070 into the editing build instead so as you can see all my hardware is laid out over here very excited to populate it inside the shift X and see how the keys handles assembly and see if it's Fred worthy right now it's on top and one more thing I forgot to mention are these things these are silver thumb screws that go along with my color scheme very well so excited to populate it not just actually you can't even do anything on the exterior but on the interior mainly to like you know hold down the GPU and like drives and stuff so we'll see alright so the assembly is complete but it wasn't without issues along the way and so I realized that working with an ITX motherboard regardless of case size I mean this one is so gigantic it is still quite challenging because of Cale management and how things are really concentrated in such tiny spaces so for example here there are a lot of cables tucked away underneath memory modules and this USB 3.0 header for the motherboard sticks out too much so this magnetic flap on this channel doesn't even close fully so what's up with that and for the power supply I actually could not mount it with a fan facing on the outside because the extension cable that is underneath the power supply is too thick and I couldn't turn it in a way that allowed me to install the power supply the way I wanted so right now it's taking air in from this area and it's exhausting it from the bottom and so this fan is here probably taking that air back inside here so it creates this little turbulent situation here which is not ideal but in terms of cable management so we do have this cable power supply shroud which is a little bit pointless it just covers up the exit area but as you can see all the cables are located on this side of the case so actually would not recommend using extensions because they just add to the bulk and you know it looks a little bit messy even with my white extensions I'm thinking if I went full black it would help to hide those cables much better and so I've tried to make them as flat as possible on this side panel I have the SSD so they're basically exiting from this shroud on this side and there they're entering back into the midsection so that I could actually round them into the motherboard and that's for the graphics card cable it just sticks out like that and it's connected right there so yeah it's a little bit convenient I try to make sure you this space is as clean as possible but of course the compromise is having all these cables and just making sure that they're flat enough so the the side panel could close just fine on this side I think I've done a really good job with kale management so first of all the GPU is over here also lit up just as the rest of my components in this nice blue for the radiator fans and the Halos RGB fan frames so I'm routing all these cables on this edge and basically stuffing all these cables here very clean on this side so that when the glass panel is sits there I mean you're gonna see all this white space that's just empty but the rest of the components look nice and tidy now we unfortunately encountered incompatibility with this vengence RGB LED Ram from Corsair with a Z 370 platform so as you can see I'm right now on the Corsair link and normally we would find the LED control right over here but it's not compatible with the Z 370 yet it's fine on Z 170 C 270 and raisa motherboards but not on this platform just yet and one more thing I will mention is that I'm very happy that asu's provides this type of network adapter instead of having dual antennas on the top because the motherboard is facing up so all the i/o is this way as you can see right now I have the USB plugged in and therefore cannot close the top panel but of course if this was removed I can simply close this like that but if your motherboard ITX motherboard had those antennas for the Wi-Fi then you wouldn't actually be able to use those ports for that so it's really good that we have this little antenna that is low-profile I could hide it somewhere actually maybe even integrate like as a shark fin somewhere like that but we'll see we'll see and I do appreciate how quiet this system is in total we have 4 140 millimeter fans one the bottom two over here and one for the motherboard area plus we have the GPU with the pump now is the power supply fan and yeah they're nice and quiet and so the next thing for me would be to figure out how to position this case inside my space just so that it complements my room and doesn't really look awkward when the salt also maybe I'm gonna place it beside my other case and maybe they just like stand together as friends but yeah then all it is to do is test out how this coffee like machine performs in games so stay tuned for part 2 coming soon and so that's it for me for today if you have any tips or feedback on how to utilize dual systems in one space without creating too much clutter let me know in the comments below I'm a dmitriy subscribe for more make sure to check out these other L&V dio's and we'll see you in the next
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