Hello everyone,
Recently i built my first SFF build and really enjoyed it so decided to share it with you guys. I hope it will be interesting to at least someone since i used quite an unusual motherboard and it took some deep shower thoughts and custom bits to make everything work together
Everything started when my old laptop (Acer V3-772G), which i was using for playing with overclocking and doing some custom cooling mods, died on me. Those couple of poor cpu vrm mosfets didnt survive twice the stock cpu wattage i guess, never got into fixing it because it was just not worth it. On the other hand i just recently bought new RAM and CPU for it felt a bit like a waste to just leave everything in a drawer collecting dust. I thought what if i reused those parts to make a desktop PC and so researching began. I found out that AsRock made industrial motherboard IMB-180 that used mobile Haswell cpus, DDR3 SO-DIMM RAM and had PCIEx16 socket. It sounded exactly like what i was looking for, except it was impossible to find it for sale. After almost 2 years it popped out on Ebay from a private seller and i bought it. Interesting thing that apparently this motherboard was used in Mercedes Benz factory in Germany somewhere on the assembly line. I didnt realize how small the Mini-ITX form factor is until i got this motherboard. Neat little thing, its something like 190x190mm. I also found a second hand Silverstone SG13 case for it and started the build.
At first i reused the 2x8GB Samsung DDR3L RAM from my old laptop, also a mpcie to M.2 adapter for wifi/bt adapter
Next goes Aliexpress Intel AX200 wifi/bt adapter and i7-4900MQ Haswell mobile cpu from my old laptop.
CPU cooling was the trickiest part of this whole project. Motherboard has the mounting hole pattern of 51x51mm which is nowhere near anything standard so i had to find a heatsink that would not interfere with anything. At first i used Deepcool Gammaxx 400 EX with custom mounting bracket, but the tower heatsink used space made for psu and psu was sitting outside the case so i decided to go low profile cooler way. I spent literally weeks searching for compatible heatsink, analyzing drawings and measuring everything. The Jonsbo Hp-400S was about the only real option that i though could work so i got it. Had modify the brackets and basically make a new spring loaded mounting system.
Mounting system done, i only forgot to take a photo how the mounting mechanism work, but basically its the same principle like GPU cooling. Had to measure literally parts of millimeter so nothing would interfere with other parts of motherboard and the cooler would be more or less centered on the CPU (its quite a delicate thing since its a delidded mobile cpu)
Even had to shorten some fins of a chipset radiator
Everything mounted, looks not bad
Heatsink clearance to RAM is micrometers, there is no access to CPU fan header anymore
So i soldered a new header on the other side of motherboard
Everything goes into Silverstone SG13 case (had to drill some holes for wifi antennas)
Time for GPU. Got this Sapphire RX 590 Nitro almost unused for dirt cheap in a middle of the mining fever. I guess the previous owner wanted to use it for mining, messed something up modifying its bios and sold it to me with almost 3 years of warranty, basically brand new. Reflashing the stock bios is all it took to fix a weird behaviour of it. I was using this GPU for 3 years everyday without any problem and decided to use it for this build.
Decided to clean the thing up and change thermal paste and thermal pads. I tend to use Thermal Grizzly stuff since it has never failed me on a performance department. I used to use Conductonaut but it ate its way into this GPU heatsink and pitted it. From my own experience - i recommend using liquid metal only for nickel plated heatsinks, never for bare copper. Even then it seems to have pitted the GPU die (visible in this photo) and my CPU as well (visible in previous photos).
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme and 0.5mm thickness Minus Pads 8 applied (i used Kryonaut Extreme for CPU as well)
Old dusty heatsink from a spare RX 580 cleaned and on the GPU (since the original had heatpipes bent too agressively and screwed up by liquid metal. It kinda dried up, got into the copper material and left the surface uneven, hence i was seeing weird temperature spikes)
RX 590 in the case. Real pain in buttocks to put it in with motherboard already in (otherwise its impossible). Fits like a glove though, i doubt that any bigger GPU could fit in this case without cutting the front fan mount out
Samsung 870 QVO 1TB SSD - one of the few things in this build that is brand new. Made a little power/sata adapter for it so it would get power straight from motherboard and not require additional power cable from PSU. Also added a big and ugly CMOS reset switch so i wouldnt have to dissassemble this whole pc every single time i brick bios when i modify something
Everything coming together, slapped a Noctua NF-A9x14 HS-PWM on CPU cooler and left the whole case airflow to Arctic Bionix P140
Made a little modification to Noctua fan so it would not loose static pressure through the sides of CPU heatsink (since its a little bit narrower than 92mm fan. Doesnt look like much, but it gave a noticeable difference in CPU temps)
Last but not least, brand new Cooler Master V550 Gold V2 White Edition 550W PSU. It had an annoyingly loud and unusual 135mm fan that i swapped to Arctic P14 (here goes the warranty but oh well, at least its dead silent now)
Cable management is not the prettiest but its much better than i initially thought it will be. Cables do not obstruct an airflow and there is still plenty of space inside. Also had to make a switch for PSU ON signal since this motherboard doesnt have such output and need only CPU 4pin cable for power. PC is alive!
Also converted front USb 3.0 ports to USB 2.0 (motherboard doesnt have USB 3.0 header) got rid of all air filters and stock meshes, had to cut some of the fan mounting panel and change the front grill to a mesh with much bigger holes (since PC cooling is my fetish hahah and all of it was necessary because GPU blows most of its hot air to the front and the whole case airflow works the way that this front fan draws in fresh air from the back of case where the motherboard shield should be and CPU cooler gets additional cold air from outside through PSU since i flipped the PSU fan to draw air inside the case. I feel that i found an optimal cooling solution for this setup)
Yup, all the cold air goes inside through all the holes you can see in here. Kinda weird but it works
The only thing i will probably change in future is this vent hole for gpu. I will probably cut it out and change to a nicer mesh or close it off and leave only a passage for Fractal Design FLEX VRC-25 PCIE riser cable so i could use a bigger GPU.
For last touches i modded the bios of this old thing (unlocked all bios menus, unlocked RAM settings to change RAM timings, downgraded CPU microcode to enable full Haswell Mobile overclocking)
Im quite happy with how this build came out. Even though its 4th gen Intel Core cpu and RX 590 its enough for everyday use and some gaming (i wanted to upgrade to EVGA 1080ti but thanks to FSR in games its not really necessary at 1440P). This cpu is capable of rocking at least 4.4Ghz all cores all day long (havent tried overclocking further since it was enough to beat everyone with this CPU in Cinebench R15 on HWbot and even 4.2/4.1/4.0/4.0Ghz is plenty fast for my uses). Im happy about temperatures too- even with this tiny CPU cooler 4900MQ rarely ever reaches 70C at around 70W and RX 590 is in 65's C when gaming.
Recently i built my first SFF build and really enjoyed it so decided to share it with you guys. I hope it will be interesting to at least someone since i used quite an unusual motherboard and it took some deep shower thoughts and custom bits to make everything work together
Everything started when my old laptop (Acer V3-772G), which i was using for playing with overclocking and doing some custom cooling mods, died on me. Those couple of poor cpu vrm mosfets didnt survive twice the stock cpu wattage i guess, never got into fixing it because it was just not worth it. On the other hand i just recently bought new RAM and CPU for it felt a bit like a waste to just leave everything in a drawer collecting dust. I thought what if i reused those parts to make a desktop PC and so researching began. I found out that AsRock made industrial motherboard IMB-180 that used mobile Haswell cpus, DDR3 SO-DIMM RAM and had PCIEx16 socket. It sounded exactly like what i was looking for, except it was impossible to find it for sale. After almost 2 years it popped out on Ebay from a private seller and i bought it. Interesting thing that apparently this motherboard was used in Mercedes Benz factory in Germany somewhere on the assembly line. I didnt realize how small the Mini-ITX form factor is until i got this motherboard. Neat little thing, its something like 190x190mm. I also found a second hand Silverstone SG13 case for it and started the build.
At first i reused the 2x8GB Samsung DDR3L RAM from my old laptop, also a mpcie to M.2 adapter for wifi/bt adapter
Next goes Aliexpress Intel AX200 wifi/bt adapter and i7-4900MQ Haswell mobile cpu from my old laptop.
CPU cooling was the trickiest part of this whole project. Motherboard has the mounting hole pattern of 51x51mm which is nowhere near anything standard so i had to find a heatsink that would not interfere with anything. At first i used Deepcool Gammaxx 400 EX with custom mounting bracket, but the tower heatsink used space made for psu and psu was sitting outside the case so i decided to go low profile cooler way. I spent literally weeks searching for compatible heatsink, analyzing drawings and measuring everything. The Jonsbo Hp-400S was about the only real option that i though could work so i got it. Had modify the brackets and basically make a new spring loaded mounting system.
Mounting system done, i only forgot to take a photo how the mounting mechanism work, but basically its the same principle like GPU cooling. Had to measure literally parts of millimeter so nothing would interfere with other parts of motherboard and the cooler would be more or less centered on the CPU (its quite a delicate thing since its a delidded mobile cpu)
Even had to shorten some fins of a chipset radiator
Everything mounted, looks not bad
Heatsink clearance to RAM is micrometers, there is no access to CPU fan header anymore
So i soldered a new header on the other side of motherboard
Everything goes into Silverstone SG13 case (had to drill some holes for wifi antennas)
Time for GPU. Got this Sapphire RX 590 Nitro almost unused for dirt cheap in a middle of the mining fever. I guess the previous owner wanted to use it for mining, messed something up modifying its bios and sold it to me with almost 3 years of warranty, basically brand new. Reflashing the stock bios is all it took to fix a weird behaviour of it. I was using this GPU for 3 years everyday without any problem and decided to use it for this build.
Decided to clean the thing up and change thermal paste and thermal pads. I tend to use Thermal Grizzly stuff since it has never failed me on a performance department. I used to use Conductonaut but it ate its way into this GPU heatsink and pitted it. From my own experience - i recommend using liquid metal only for nickel plated heatsinks, never for bare copper. Even then it seems to have pitted the GPU die (visible in this photo) and my CPU as well (visible in previous photos).
Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut Extreme and 0.5mm thickness Minus Pads 8 applied (i used Kryonaut Extreme for CPU as well)
Old dusty heatsink from a spare RX 580 cleaned and on the GPU (since the original had heatpipes bent too agressively and screwed up by liquid metal. It kinda dried up, got into the copper material and left the surface uneven, hence i was seeing weird temperature spikes)
RX 590 in the case. Real pain in buttocks to put it in with motherboard already in (otherwise its impossible). Fits like a glove though, i doubt that any bigger GPU could fit in this case without cutting the front fan mount out
Samsung 870 QVO 1TB SSD - one of the few things in this build that is brand new. Made a little power/sata adapter for it so it would get power straight from motherboard and not require additional power cable from PSU. Also added a big and ugly CMOS reset switch so i wouldnt have to dissassemble this whole pc every single time i brick bios when i modify something
Everything coming together, slapped a Noctua NF-A9x14 HS-PWM on CPU cooler and left the whole case airflow to Arctic Bionix P140
Made a little modification to Noctua fan so it would not loose static pressure through the sides of CPU heatsink (since its a little bit narrower than 92mm fan. Doesnt look like much, but it gave a noticeable difference in CPU temps)
Last but not least, brand new Cooler Master V550 Gold V2 White Edition 550W PSU. It had an annoyingly loud and unusual 135mm fan that i swapped to Arctic P14 (here goes the warranty but oh well, at least its dead silent now)
Cable management is not the prettiest but its much better than i initially thought it will be. Cables do not obstruct an airflow and there is still plenty of space inside. Also had to make a switch for PSU ON signal since this motherboard doesnt have such output and need only CPU 4pin cable for power. PC is alive!
Also converted front USb 3.0 ports to USB 2.0 (motherboard doesnt have USB 3.0 header) got rid of all air filters and stock meshes, had to cut some of the fan mounting panel and change the front grill to a mesh with much bigger holes (since PC cooling is my fetish hahah and all of it was necessary because GPU blows most of its hot air to the front and the whole case airflow works the way that this front fan draws in fresh air from the back of case where the motherboard shield should be and CPU cooler gets additional cold air from outside through PSU since i flipped the PSU fan to draw air inside the case. I feel that i found an optimal cooling solution for this setup)
Yup, all the cold air goes inside through all the holes you can see in here. Kinda weird but it works
The only thing i will probably change in future is this vent hole for gpu. I will probably cut it out and change to a nicer mesh or close it off and leave only a passage for Fractal Design FLEX VRC-25 PCIE riser cable so i could use a bigger GPU.
For last touches i modded the bios of this old thing (unlocked all bios menus, unlocked RAM settings to change RAM timings, downgraded CPU microcode to enable full Haswell Mobile overclocking)
Im quite happy with how this build came out. Even though its 4th gen Intel Core cpu and RX 590 its enough for everyday use and some gaming (i wanted to upgrade to EVGA 1080ti but thanks to FSR in games its not really necessary at 1440P). This cpu is capable of rocking at least 4.4Ghz all cores all day long (havent tried overclocking further since it was enough to beat everyone with this CPU in Cinebench R15 on HWbot and even 4.2/4.1/4.0/4.0Ghz is plenty fast for my uses). Im happy about temperatures too- even with this tiny CPU cooler 4900MQ rarely ever reaches 70C at around 70W and RX 590 is in 65's C when gaming.
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