Bolt II Overhaul

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I'd really like to see board manufacturers dropping the sata connectors in favor of a u.2 or a mini-sas connector on mITX boards.

My ideal ITX would have an m.2 and an U.2, and nothing more.

I'm 100% with you there. Perhaps one day...too much in the way of legacy devices at the moment. I'm even still going to be using the SATA connector for the optical drive in my Bolt. However, in a future where we are down to no SATA, were I to still want to connect it up, I do have a USB to Slim-SATA adapter to take care of that.

 

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I finally got my i9-9900K. I had originally ordered through ShopBLT, but they delayed at least 6 times and no assurances of when it would ship, I decided to cancel it and just get it through Amazon.

I'm traveling soon, so I decided that I'll stick it in my S4M-C for the immediate term. I removed the ID-Cooling IS-VC45 vapor chamber and found that the surface that is supposed to contact the processor is not flat at all. There were lots of unevenness and 5 very low spots:

After going through two pieces of emory cloth and wet sanding with two pieces of 800 grit (I had to be pretty aggressive...these grooves were deep), I eventually got it looking like this:

So far, with a Noctua NF-A9x14 it idles nicely at 10-11°C above ambient, although, predictably, it quickly overheats when under heavy load with default settings. This is why the ultimate home for this will be the Bolt II, where I can water cool it and keep temps in check. But, I will be tweaking it in the meanwhile in the S4M-C.