We cram two radiators, five fans, a dual-GPU video card, and 850-watt power supply into a micro-ATX cube—no big deal
This rig should take two to four hours to build. Difficulty level is medium.
The Mission
Anyone can put some fancy gear into a regular tower case. It's like Lego, but not as expensive. With the growing trend toward shrinking cases, we like to challenge ourselves by maintaining silly amounts of performance within small real estate. We tried this route with a recent Build It, featuring a mini-ITX tower from Silverstone and a GTX 780 Ti video card from Nvidia, but there just wasn't enough physical space for the system to really shine. To achieve the power and cooling that we really wanted, we needed a bigger boat. This micro-ATX box is arguably our craziest attempt yet-not just in terms of how much mojo we've wedged in there, but also in how close this build came to not working at all. We discovered that there was pretty much no margin for error, and a slightly different selection of hardware probably would have meant failure to launch. Some of it we got lucky with, while other things we had to replace or scrounge for. But we clawed our way to victory, because the idea was too audacious to merely daydream about.
Jumbo Shrimp
We needed a solid foundation to house a card as beefy as a Radeon R9 295X2, which squeezes two 290X GPUs onto one dual-slot card and cools itself with an integrated 120mm closed-loop liquid cooler (CLC). We also decided on a 240mm CLC for our Intel Core i7-4770K. And the 295X2 alone would need a full-sized ATX power supply. But there aren't a lot of cases that can wrangle all this hardware and still provide enough ventilation to keep everyone happy. Luckily, we'd recently received a micro-ATX Bitfenix Colossus Mini, a shrink-ray version of the company's full-tower case. Not to be confused with the mini-ITX Mini, which is even mini-er. Our Mini had enough fan mounts and just enough internal real estate to close the deal. Barely. After some experimentation (explained later), we settled on the Lepa G850-MAS power supply, an 850-watt unit. This PSU fit the bill because its cables are clustered to one side of the unit, and it's been well-reviewed. Being a "gold" rated PSU didn't hurt, either. We needed a lot of power efficiency to make this build work. Our CPU got a Cooler Master Glacer 240L, a CLC with a 240mm radiator, to keep it nice and chilly. The connectors on the radiator end can swivel for a level of flexibility that you don't usually see with this type of unit. Our motherboard of choice was a micro-ATX Gigabyte Z97M-D3H, which gave us some ergonomic flexibility later on.
1. I'm Your Biggest Fan
The Bitfenix Colossus Mini comes with two 120mm stock fans. We removed them both and replaced them with a pair of Enermax TKTKs that we wanted to test out. This upgrades us from 3-pin to 4-pin fans, allowing us to control their speed ranges with instructions given to the motherboard. We salvaged a 4-pin splitter cable from a CLC kit to plug both fans into one mobo fan header. These fans install in the bottom as intakes, with their screws coming in from below. We added chrome grills to keep the blades from getting caught on anything. Safety first! You could also install a single 230mm fan in this spot instead.
2. Install the Cooler
We knew we needed a boatload of power to handle this kind of gear, so we aimed for at least 850 watts. At the same time, the power supply couldn't be too beefy, because a 295X stretches across the entire length of this case and could obstruct the unit. Even with our connectors clustered to the left, we barely got the card to slide past the cables. It still blocks two connectors, but the two PCIe cables and the SATA power cable that we can attach are plenty for our purposes. The SATA cable will power an SSD and the CLC's pump. There's a second 8-pin CPU power cable coming out the back that we won't be using, but there's space to tuck it away on the other side of the PSU. Unfortunately, there isn't anywhere else to tuck other cables out of sight, but the Colossus Mini doesn't have a side window to expose our messy internals.
3. Seeing Double
Putting in the video card isn't as hard as it looks. It just needs to go in before the CPU's radiator does. The others cables pictured can be pulled out of the way. The tightest fit in this section was actually the card's own radiator, which gets close enough to the 295X2 to graze its backplate. Turned 180 degrees, the rad would not fit. If the card was fatter than normal, the tubing on the radiator above it might not be bendy enough to get around. If the card were too tall, it would block our critical power supply connectors. Basically, AMD's reference dimensions were critical to our success.
4. X Marks the Spot
The X-shaped bracket pictured is the backplate for our Cooler Master's Glacer 240L CPU cooler. This installation process became, shall we say, an enlightening challenge when confined to a Colossus Mini that was starting to fill up with hardware. In retrospect, installing the cooler first probably would have been better. The bracket doesn't stick through the other side of the motherboard, so it's difficult to fasten the heatsink's bracket to it. The backplate's adhesive pads are also very small and not very effective. Still, we were able to squeeze a 4.4GHz overclock out of our Core i7-4770K CPU, despite it competing with the video card for intake. The Gigabyte Z97M-D3H micro-ATX board is not a fancy unit, so we didn't expect record-breaking OCs anyway. The cooler's 240mm radiator also ended up blocking the other PCI Express slot on the motherboard when we installed it in the top of the case, so it turns out that a dual-GPU card was the best option after all.
5. Do You Even Flip?
The Cooler Master 240L comes with its fans preinstalled on the radiator, which has become increasingly popular. CM also attached the fans with small screws that can only be reached by a screwdriver with a narrow shaft. We had a Snap-On kit that fit the bill. We needed to flip the fans so that they would be pulling heat off the radiator and blowing it out of the case, instead of fighting the video card for intake. How is this possible? Well, the Colossus Mini has an inverted motherboard tray, so the mobo goes in upside down-putting the video card right below the 240L. This also put a bunch of USB, front-panel, and audio connectors at the top of the case, so we had to hook up those before they were blocked by the 240L's rad. This meant reversing the Colossus Mini's side panels, which is why the white stripes on the side don't line up with the white stripe on the front; the case's power button is located on a side panel instead, making wiring a bit challenging with our jam-packed system.
6. Radical Engineering
Installing the video card's radiator was pretty easy by comparison. We had already installed the CPU's heatsink with its tubing on the opposite side of the video card radiator's mount point. That way, the heatsink could be removed later, without having to take out the rad first. The cable for its pre-attached 120mm fan is wired directly into the card and gets power right off of the PCI Express bus, which is a smart way of eliminating the need for an extra fan header on the motherboard. Likely buyers of this board will probably be using a lot of fan headers already, and this design keeps the cabling clean for showing off to your friends and neighbors. Our non-retail version of the card didn't come with mounting screws (the retail one does), but power-supply screws worked perfectly and are commonly found on most builders' workbenches. The part of the rad where the tubes goes in has some bulk, so it has to be on the bottom. There's literally no room to rotate it, because the video card is right there.
1. The 5.25-inch drive bay is secured with six screws, so we just pulled it out to make way for this 12.5-inch long video card.
2. The connectors on this radiator can rotate a full 360 degrees, so maneuvering them around the video card wasn't a problem.
3. The front of the case has a large grill that the power supply uses as an intake, helping it run coolly and efficiently.
4. The rear of the case will fit a 140mm fan, but case fans installed right below would probably block a 140mm radiator.
The Little Engine That Could
Were it not for our library of spare parts, this build might not have come together. The flip side is that we sometimes use a part or two that's hard to find at retail, like our Lepa G850-MAS, so the build ends up an experiment instead of something you could replicate. If you have a PSU that's semi-modular or non-modular, no longer than 6.3 inches, and provides about 850 watts or more, and its modular connectors are clustered close to the motherboard power cable, you may be in luck.
As for our storage devices, there's a metal plate for that, which screws in above the motherboard, and leaving it in during photography would have blocked the view of everything inside. Since it's just a plate with drive mounts on it, we simply left it out of the shots. But we can tell you that it could fit two 2.5-inch drives and one 3.5-inch drive. Your connectors can't go in at right angles, though, because the rear of the drive doesn't end up flush against the edge of the plate. Hopefully, Bitfenix will consider changing that in later versions of this case.
But you're probably wondering what the build felt like once it was finally up and running. Well, with two 290X GPUs along for the ride, we could max out all our game settings even at Ultra HD (aka 4K) res. We did usually disable anti-aliasing, because the much higher pixel density at 3840x2160 gains minimal visual improvements from AA but has a high performance cost. AMD's drivers also let us attempt to force Crossfire (the company's version of SLI) when a game didn't have a CF profile written for it, so that was nice. The motherboard handled a CPU overclock of 4.4GHz without breaking a sweat, keeping us surprisingly close to the zero-point machine's hex-core Core i7-3930K.
The fans on the 240mm radiator did get louder than we'd like. Even with the motherboard instructed to use a "silent" mode, the fans still cranked up to about 1,800rpm under load. The video card's radiator fan hardly made a peep, despite the card never hitting 70 degrees Celsius, so we know that the system was getting plenty of air. It could be that the 240L was fighting the 295's intake fan for air, despite the 240L's fans being on the other side of the rad. But overall, the build felt like a success, and we enjoyed learning more about space management.
From maximumpc
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