Pelican's First SFF Build :o (NCase M1)

[Pelican]

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Well this is my first official SFF build. A few months a go I built a new AM4 rig using Gigabyte's flagship AX370 Gaming-K7 motherboard. It was my second build ever, and the first using a full ATX board. It's a great machine but I decided I grossly miss having a small computer, and my ATX case is pretty empty. Since then, I discovered this community, and I decided to finally buy an NCase M1 after years of wanting one.

This build log isn't anything remarkable really, but I decided that since this will be my first SFF build, I'm going to have fun with a topic. I'm not doing anything fancy, although I plan to use components with LED lighting (without putting a window in) to see what that looks like. The specs are pretty good on paper, too. I'll be reusing some components I bought last year.

I like playing games, but I also like doing creative work for fun (digital art, programming and hobbyist game development). I'm also at uni doing a lot of CS work and programming at the moment. I decided the Ryzen 1700 was a good match for the mix of stuff I like to do. I won't be dragging this computer around a lot, but I like to have a smaller system so I have the option of easy portability in case I have to leave my home for a long period of time.


Hardware & Junk

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I've bought a new motherboard, the Gigabyte AB350N. I've also purchased a Corsair SF600 PSU which should be arriving in the mail next week.

I'll be reusing my 8GB RX 480 which I bought last year. It's a reference model with blower-style fan, which might be helpful with the temps.

I've got a Ryzen 1700 CPU that I would like to overclock a little, and I'm using the stock cooler since it is fancy enough. I bought some Noctua NT-H1 thermal paste to move the CPU over (it'll be my first time using thermal paste, I've not bothered overclocking in the past, or removing stock coolers).

I'll be reusing my 240GB Intel SSD and my WD Black 1TB drive. I bought these mid last year, so no need to replace.

One thing I didn't put in the above picture; I've got 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM (2x 8GB sticks) @ 3200mhz C16. It was the most affordable, but on my ATX board I was only able to get it going at 2933mhz using the standard XMP profile.

Some other junk; a Panasonic UJ-265 bluray drive for my NCase (I have the black optical slot model, version 5.0), as well as a slimline sata to sata adapter to hook it up. I've also gone and bought 2x Thermaltake Riing 12, orange LED version. They are designed for both small spaces and radiators, so it'll be interesting to see how that works out. I plan to just blow air in through the side panel and see how that goes, but frankly I hardly know anything about sensible air cooling configuration.


Orange Lighting Experiment

The lighting in my case will be orange, and will come from the Thermaltake fans, the RGB CPU cooler, and the LEDs built into one side of the Gigabyte motherboard. I'm not planning to have a window. I'm hoping it will glow like a lamp, with the light spilling out of the side panels and underneath the case. Will it look any good, or will it be an ugly monstrosity? Stay tuneddddd.

The cartoony NCase image at the top of the topic is exaggerated. The LED fans will probably be obscured by a dust cover, so how it will actually look is unknown.


My Progress Log

15th July 2017
I am waiting on my optical drive and the sata adapter, as well as my power supply. I have everything else. I will probably have to add the optical drive at a later time because it looks like it will take a couple of weeks for the adapter to get here. I have no more news to share at the moment. D:

19th July 2017
My PSU has arrived, but still waiting on the optical drive. I started the build and I try and take some crappy images of the lighting in an un-modded case. Click here for the full post.

22nd July 2017
Optical drive arrives from China! Very well packaged, but I can't test it yet, as I am waiting for my slimline adapter. Click here for the post.

27th July 2017
The slimline adapter arrived. Blu-ray optical drive is installed and working! See a GIF of the drive ejecting discs in my main post here.

12th August 2017
I talk about the issue of having high pressure fans and what that means for dust falling down into the case from the top panel (hint: it isn't an issue). See the post here.

 

[jeshikat]

Panasonic UJ-265 bluray drive

How much did that set you back?

 

[Pelican]

How much did that set you back?

It cost me $99 USD new, shipping out of China. I paid listing price for it. I'm a bit nervous about it, because I bought it from eBay, but the seller has a long history of positive reviews.

The optical drive was quite important to me, but it hurt paying that much. For the same cost you can get a significantly faster pro-grade optical drive for a desktop. You can also get slot loading DVD drives for a fraction of the cost.

I believe the UJ-265 is the only 12.5mm bluray / DVD slot combo that also supports burning to M-Disc (an archival grade format that I use quite a bit). On top of that I had to buy an adapter because it has a slimline sata interface like most laptop drives.

EDIT: forgot to add that adapters are about $6 USD or so.

 

[Pelican]

Woop, the PSU arrived today. The SF600 is a very nice piece. I found it interesting how both the cables and the PSU itself came in two separate bags that were made out of a velvety material. My older Seasonic 430w non-modular PSU had nothing like that, being a budget friendly PSU. My current EVGA 650 G3 has a bigger bag that is made out of something like polyethylene canvas. I dunno, I guess I find something unnecessarily plush about using bags like this. Neat though!

That image shows one of the bags containing the cables. The cables themselves do not have any fancy sleeving on them. They are plastic and reminiscent of flat ribbon cables.. The SF600 is widely celebrated as one of the best SFX PSUs on the market today, but it has been criticised for having average-quality cables. I haven't worked with them yet so I'm not sure myself.

There are my new components. Mobo, PSU, two fans, and the NCase M1 of course. Optical drive and adapter haven't arrived yet. Everything else is being taken from my current machine, as mentioned in the OP. RAM and CPU are only a few months old. The drives and the GPU are less than a year old.

Time to get started I guess. Feels bad disassembling my current computer though. ;o;

 

[Pelican]

So I spent all day on my SFF build and I'm currently using it now.

I have a lot to say on the parts I used and some problems I've had, but for now, I wanted to share how it looks with the lights in it.

It has been really hard to capture using my phone because it kept losing focus when trying to take the photo in the dark, and the lighting is quite subtle. In person, I think it looks kind of magical. This is in a pitch black room so all the strange lighting patterns are coming from the computer itself.

Here you can see the Thermaltake Riing 12 fans. A lot of light spills out of the back of the computer creating line patterns, while the light coming from the LEDs on the Gigabyte motherboard is creating circular shapes to the right.

Here it is zoomed out a bit, you can make out the NCase power button here. Again, sorry the photos are shit, my phone hates the dark apparently.

Looking into the top panel. Very blurry but you can see the Ryzen Wraith Spire cooler giving off a green colour (need to change that to orange). You can also see the mobo and the Riing fans glowing two types of orange in there. I will be adjusting it all soon. I want to make it match orange, but I might also see what unusual lighting effects I can create.

This is the other side of the NCase (although in this photo I have my monitor on as well so you're seeing white light from that too). The LEDs on the Gigabyte motherboard add some interest to this side.

I plan on taking some better photos with a better camera soon but that is the best I could do right now. D:

Thus concludes the lighting experiment. However, I took some photos as I built it which I'll add in the next post. Here it is not looking like big foot:

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Building it

I started by putting the IO shield on and sticking the mobo in. Put my Vengeance RAM in and then cleaned the CPU and cooler so I could apply thermal paste.

I haven't applied thermal paste before. Usually I stick with stock coolers (I have in this case as well; I kept the Wraith Spire RGB cooler) and I don't take them off. It wasn't fun preparing the CPU, I was scared I would bend a pin or something. I applied the NT-H1 paste in a pea shaped blob in the middle of the CPU, as it seemed the most sensible method for this CPU.

Thoughts on installing the Corsair SF600 PSU

• The Corsair PSU cables are a bit hard to work with because of the ribbon shape. They take up more width in the build, which creates the illusion of a denser cabling job. I prefer thick tube wires.
• Some of the Corsair connectors were super stiff when going into the connectors on the motherboard and into the PSU itself. The main ATX power connector was the worst. It required a lot of pressure and wriggling, and I had to support the mobo with my other hand because it was causing it to flex.
• More complains about the Corsair cables; the SATA power cables don't lay flat enough, so I couldn't plug it into my hard drive which I had mounted on the bottom of the case. I had to use the molex PSU cables instead, because luckily I had a converter cable on hand. My EVGA PSU had flat SATA power connectors which I tested. They worked fine. It's definitely an issue with the design of Corsair's cables.
• The unit itself is really nice. It is great quality. It bought the US version from Amazon and it works fine here on our 230/240 volts / 50 hertz power. I checked that it would before I purchased, but some people might be wondering if they need to buy a localised version of the PSU or if the US one will work. They are all the same I believe, the US one just comes with a US plug.

Thoughts on installing the Thermaltake Riing 12 PSUs

• It's really easy to use the screws to create threads. Some fans are super stiff and hard to screw in.
• These fans are super noisy at 100%, buy there is a cable included that reduces the speed to 33%. Use it if you are using the molex connectors, because otherwise the noise is super annoying. That said, putting one of these above my CPU took the temp down by 5 °C and the mobo temps by several degrees in some places. You could feel the air being pushed out the top and sides of the case, and it could hold a sheet of paper with it's intake suction. I'm running it on slow speed now, so I'm not sure how much it is helping. I haven't tested it with the fans off yet.
• The light isn't as strong as I hoped, and you can't see the light rings unless you have a reasonable view of the side of the case. This is because of how the light rings are on the internal edge of the fans, but also because I've got the magnetic dust strip over the top, which further obscures light.

Here is the IO shield of the Gigabyte AB350 Gaming Wifi AM4 board. The black design is nice and plain and goes with most cases. The shiny "Gigabyte Gaming" emblem is a sticker that comes with the motherboard. I chose to put it there, but you can keep it blank if you prefer.

This is midway through assembly. Motherboard and CPU in. Just adding the PSU here, and also trying to figure out where my cables are going.

I've got my RX 480 put in, as well as my hard drive (below it to the left) and my SSD (on the right side). The NCase M1 made it easy, I just used the rubber tabs and screws that it came with. With a bit of wriggling, the drives slot into their designated holes on the case. Nice and snug. c:

You can also see the cable situation going south here. I wasn't sure what to do. The inflexibility of the cables was annoying, and I had to figure out how to make sense of the uncommon layout of the Gigabyte board. I decide to route the cables above the CPU, and try to tie them together, but I had half given up. You can see my ugly molex-to-sata cable here. At this point I realised I would need to buy some custom cables to get a decent configuration going. That said, I think it's okay.

(Sorry for the blurriness). Quick, hide it under fans. These fans are specially designed for small gaps and can be used with radiators. There is plenty of room for air to get in (the cables might look like the take up a lot of space but it's not so bad actually). I'm just using these as intake to push hot air out the top and to reduce the mobo temperature in theory. There are probably better ways to do this.

For some reason it looks like it is floating in the last pictures lol.

 

[Pelican]

Optical Drive Arrived

But haven't received the slimline sata adapter yet. Haven't been able to test the drive, but it looks good to me. It arrived well packaged with Saturday delivery paid for. Inside was a box with bubble wrap and padding cut out to the shape of the optical drive, which is in a protective anti-static bag. I am very glad that it the packaging was given this level of attention, because you worry with items like optical drives.

Temps so far

I was looking at the temps I am getting in HWmonitor and I'm not sure what to make of them.

SSD and WD Black drive are reporting temps of 21 - 25 and 31 - 25 degrees respectively.

My RX 480 is idling at 32 degrees, but is coping with games at between 73 and 80 degrees. 80 degrees is typical, but unlike my previous full ATX build, I'm noticing the GPU is usually operating between 73 - 75 degrees in games, which is better. I suspect this is because I am using a reference model and the fan is able to draw air from the bottom vent of the case (in my other build it was taking in case air). I've also got a fan blowing right above it, so maybe that helps?

My Ryzen 1700 is idling at 41 degrees, gaming at 50 degrees. Using the "Small FFTs (maximum heat)" stress test in prime95, I'm getting 69 degrees. I'm not especially impressed by this. I'm using the stock cooler, and I applied some Noctua thermal paste myself. I don't really know what to expect here... is this adequate, or could it be a problem with cooling or my thermal paste application? Maybe someone can advise? If I have my Thermtake case fans on 100%, it is able to reduce the temperature by 5 or so degrees, but the noise is too annoying so I have them running at 33%.

As for the Gigabyte board, the temperature sensors report between 18 and 48 degrees on different areas of the board. TMPIN5 and TMPIN1 seem to heat up the most under load. Playing games gets me about 52 degrees on TMPIN5. If I stress test, it reaches 60 degrees. I was able to reduce the temperature of TMPIN5 by about 8 degrees with fans on full, but again, the noise is too much.

 

[Pelican]

Optical Adapter Arrived

The optical drive I purchased required a slimline-sata adapter so I could connect standard-size power and sata cables. The adapters are cheap, but they do the job. I think the brand of mine is Startech. Some reviews said it was a bit flimsy to work with, and I agree. The connect that plugs into the optical drive itself feels a bit loose. I noticed the tension from the power cable was pushing the adapter outwards slightly. Once I put the front plate of the NCase M1 back on, I *think* it pushed the cables and nudged the adapter into a more comfortable position. Either way, Windows detected the drive with no fuss. I tested a bluray movie in the drive and it works perfectly. Hopefully the adapter will not move around and loosen.

Here is the Panasonic UJ265 slotted into place and screwed in. It fits nicely. I purchased the OEM-style model without any front cover. It was cheaper and I figured it made more sense, but I'm not so sure anymore. The drive itself does not have a material strip protecting the opening (which is typical of slot loading drives in laptops and AIOs) and I am mildly concerned that this could make it a dust trap over time. I did notice that once a disc is in the the drive and spinning, the rotation causes air to blow out of the slot like a fan.

This is the adapter itself on the left. On the right, it is plugged into the drive, and you can see how the cable tension is making it protrude slightly when the front of the NCase is removed.

And, of course, what fun is a slot loading drive is you don't get to see it spit out discs? Here it is in action:

 

[jeshikat]

If you have a hot glue gun that's a easy and removable way to secure the adapter in place.

 

[Pelican]

Ooo that could work. If it slips out at any point, I'll look into it.

 

[TheHig]

I don't think the temps on your 1700 are bad considering you are on the stock cooler and in a small enclosure. I had pretty similar temps with mine on the supplied cooler with 2x 120mm intake and 1x 120mm exhaust fan. That was with a nitro rx480 and it was wanting to go plenty hot before tweaking the overkill stock voltage down some. Like the swanky lighting as well.

Looks good. Thanks for sharing!

 

[Pelican]

Thanks!

I think you're right about the temps. I saw a thread on Reddit recently, where people were discussing their Ryzen 1700 temps using the stock cooler. My temps seemed to be about average for a basic air cooling setup, based on what others were reporting.

 

[Pelican]

So I've been using my new computer for almost a month now, and I'm very happy with it.

I wanted to talk about dust. The NCase has ventilation gaps on every side except the front. I was concerned about dust falling through the top panel, as well as dust getting into my optical drive (remember, the drive slot is on the top of the case, and I bought an OEM bluray drive without any slot cover).

Having the high pressure fans on the right side of my case has prevented dust being an issue. I have the magnet mesh over the fans, which stops a lot of dust getting in. The airflow pushes out through the top of the case, including the optical drive gap (there is a small gap between the bluray drive and the top panel) which is enough to push dust and fibres upwards and away. Dust has not settled into the case because of this.

 

[Pelican]

I decided to bump with an update one year later.

I'm glad I swapped to the NCASE and completed this build, as I've needed to move around a fair bit this year, and being able to take my lil' computer with me has been great.

One year on and it has been going well for the most part (see below). The dust contents in the machine is very low. I gave it a little tidy up the other day but found there was very little dust to clean. Most of the dust comes in through the side fans, which blow air inwards and upwards, preventing ambient dust from settling.

Some unfortunate news; my GPU seems to be failing and it is no longer in warranty according to the store I bought it from, so I've contacted Sapphire to see if anything can be done. I've never had a GPU fail on me after such a short time. I've also had some issues with some of the USB 3.1 ports on my mobo (not recognising devices) but I'm not sure what the cause is there.

Will report back on the progress there.

 

[Pelican]

Problems Update October 2018

I went to the store I bought my GPU from and they told me the warranty was out. Unwilling to accept this, I contacted Sapphire, who said it was in warranty and referred me to a local company that supplies PC parts (one I was familiar with as a place I used to work for uses them for their tech solutions).

I contacted this company and told them Sapphire had said it was within warranty. They told me it wasn't within warranty, and asked for the emails I got from Sapphire. They ended up contacting Sapphire themselves, who once again approved the warranty claim, so they were happy for me to hand it over and helped with the RMA process. As the RX 480 no longer exists (in reality it was more or less re-badged as a 580) I was offered a second hand "refurb" RX 480 Nitro but they wouldn't tell me what the history of the card was or to what extent "refurb" actually meant. They also did extensive tests on the card and found no issues. I wasn't getting any DisplayPort output, but they quite clearly demonstrated that this issue wasn't occurring for them. I decided to take my card back-- they cleaned the dust out of the card, gave me the test report, and I took it home. My only theory now is that the DisplayPort cables are faulty (it turns out both of the ones I tested with were from the same company...)

However, fast forward a few weeks, and we have strange developments. The other morning my computer wouldn't post. Long story short, I can't even get the thing to make system beeps when powering it with everything but the CPU and CPU fan removed. I'm discussing this in another topic at the moment, trying to seek help, but it seems like my motherboard might be dead... or it might be a rare cmos battery glitch. The jury is out, but I really don't need this problem right now. As as student, I can't afford to lose access to my main rig like this, and I literally can't afford to fix it.

My poor NCase in pieces D;​

In the meantime, I've dusted off my trusty old late-2012 rig. I kept it for a time like this, plus it was my first build and I'm nostalgic about it. I've got an i5-3570, 16GB of ram, a 1TB WD Black drive, and some version of the Asus BW Pro bluray burner / player drive (a later addition). It is housed in a black BitFenix Prodigy case, which enjoyed a great reputation back then, and was something of a beginner-friendly mITX case in my opinion (although it is offensively large compared to true SFF computers, and frankly, most other mITX cases).

It wasn't smooth sailing though... I've had problems with Windows updates not installing and corrupting, which took me all day to fix. I also spent two days trying to figure out why my wifi driver wasn't working. It only occurred to me in the last couple of hours that I might have disabled it in the BIOS... turns out I had (back when I stuck a PCIe wifi card in it for fun after removing the GPU last year).