Hi, everybody! I've liked SFF since the early 2000's, when I decided that MATX appealed to me more than ATX. I even owned a Shuttle SV25 for several months, until something on the motherboard failed and I went back to MATX. I remember that sense of satisfaction when I put that MATX case under my computer desk and admired how compact it was. Today, I think of everything my phone does and can't help feeling like my MATX mid-tower is a mainframe sitting on my desk. I just bought the hardware for my first M-ITX build. My burly Corsair Obsidian 250D might not be in the spirit of SFF, but I wanted to give myself some room. I don't want to go super-small right away and find that I've limited myself too much. I can always move my components into a smaller case later once I have a better sense of M-ITX. In the mean time, I look forward to discussing SFF here.
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- Thread starter Vincent3
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The Corsair 250D and BitFenix Prodigy are gateway drugs to hardcore SFF, beware! Your wallet will suffer the further down the rabbit hole you go
Take the red pill. We'll show you how deep this rabbit hole goes.
Welcome ! Which other forum has 3 staff members greeting you in a 15 minute span living thousands of miles apart ?
The first one that comes to mind is this one, and this one only
Welcome aboard ! I'm actually having the same approach, but GPU-less. Going from mATX to thin mini-ITX (quite the jump).
I'm gonna design my own chassis, want it to match the amplifier I'm designing.
Class A speaker power amplifier and a separated preamplifier. Computer chassis will be classic old school power amp design, no cable, no LED, no USB, no front IO only a power switch.
Excellent I sincerely love the austere audiophile look of the early 90s. I don't care much for front/side IO ports especially with SFF seems to defeat the purpose... if the case is small enough and you have a quality USB 3.0 hub it is much more manageable/functional.
I only have 4 USB peripherals:
- Keyboard + Trackball
- 2x SNES gamepad
I think the closest, electronically-wise, would be the french brand called Atoll. Very straight forward design, using almost only through-hole discrete components and very few of them at that.
Aesthetically-wise, that would be the front heatsink like Quad 405:
Very nice... damn what a blast from the past regarding the Quad 405... I remember drooling over a Stereophile article about it. I was always a sucker for their ESL-63 panel speakers as well. Funny you know Atoll... very nice French company I had an opportunity to steal one of their higher model integrated amps, in mint condition for only US 500, from a friend but didn't... still kicking myself for that!
