Prototype Project Orthrus - Smallest SLI mATX case (V2)
- Thread starter LukeD
- Start date
Good questions. I need to make a couple of updates in the first post as a lot of information is outdated.
- The best PSU for this case is the Silverstone SFX-L 800Watt. Highest rated PSU that size. You can get 700Watt and 500Watt variants of it. Its cheaper than the FSP PSU and quieter. It does mean however, that the top GPU slot will need a GPU wc block, not a full card block if you plan on water cooling. I would suggest something like the Koolance GPU-230.
- Li-Heat have made special length SLI cables for me for this case. They will be available for purchase.
Hey @LukeD , I've been paying attention to this project since Linus released his video on it and I was wondering if there is any info on a release date. The answer is most likely in front of my face and I'm just to stupid to find it, but i'm so excited to get my hands on this project as i'm hoping to build my next rig based on this. Thanks for working on this awesome project!
@LukeD can you estimate price and delivery date for this case? looks really awsome 
I'm a little disappointed that you can't fit an unmodified waterblock in the top slot when using an SFX power supply, but i guess it's too late for that now. Looking forward to availability
@potoooooooo What do you mean... having two identical water blocks on the top and bottom card makes it look much better and using a standard water block on the top would force the case to be bigger... Why would you want that?
Because A) It's going to make tube routing significantly more difficult and B) I only plan on using one GPU anyway, which makes A significantly worse.
Not to mention the actual process of modifying the waterblocks. Not a huge fan of that in general. I'm kind of a fan of resale value.
@potoooooooo You could use the bottom slot with a GPU with a standard block if you don't use the top slot in the case for something.
@LukeD - I really love the case design you've created and I can honestly say your case is probably my 'dream case' at the moment. I'm especially glad there will be the option for aluminium side panels as I honestly really dislike the current trend of putting clear side windows on cases.
Is staying subscribed to this thread the best way to keep on top of future news regarding the initial release? As soon as pricing is confirmed, I will happily put in a pre-order! Are you still thinking Kickstarter or directly through the case manufacturer?
Is staying subscribed to this thread the best way to keep on top of future news regarding the initial release? As soon as pricing is confirmed, I will happily put in a pre-order! Are you still thinking Kickstarter or directly through the case manufacturer?
That's probably what i'll end up doing, either that or just man up and mod a 1U PSU. It's not a big deal either way, i hope it didn't seem like i was criticizing too much. This is a really great project. I was working on my own design until i realized this case is mostly perfect for me.
@LukeD I want to share a little more thought I've had recently about the best way to set up this case. I liked the idea I had a while back about air cooling the CPU and water cooling the GPU's, so I did some more research on that recently on how far I could go with this. I was curious if I could successfully air cool an x299 CPU - preferably the i7-7820X I had planned to use with the AsRock x299 Mini ITX motherboard. After doing some research, I stumbled across a recent S4 Mini video from NFC. He used the same motherboard with an i9-7920X, which has the same 140 Watt TDP as the CPU I plan to use. I saw that with the Dynatron R30, a full copper, vaper chamber heat sink, under max load the temperatures settled around 96C max. Now this isn't really that great, but luckily there is still one more thing you can do. Delidding the CPU and replacing Intel's crappy thermal compound with a liquid metal has been shown to decrease temperatures up to 20C under full load. That means with this CPU and cooler, I should be able to keep temperatures under 80C, which is well within the range of "acceptable". This may not provide any OC room, but I don't plan to OC the CPU anyways. This then leaves the 240mm radiator to cool the two GPU's by themselves, which means great GPU clock speeds and temperatures. I think this will work out wonderfully, and make one bad ass gaming, and semi-work station build for your case. I have a few questions to ask though. Firstly, if you don't plan to distribute the modded EK water blocks for the graphics cards, will you atleast provide a tutorial on how to mod the blocks ourselves? I'm willing to do the work for those water blocks because they not only fit well and look absolutely amazing ( being able to see the liquid flow through the block in the vertical position ), they probably even provide better temperatures than the universal blocks you have mentioned. Secondly, is it possible that we can get the case with one side being transparent and the other side being aluminum or whatever your solid panels will be? Since the motherboard side ( of my build particularly ) will not be the most visually appealing due to it having a copper heat sink and an ugly noctua fan over it ( I will be replacing the stock fan that comes with the Dynatron cooler because it is meant for server rooms and is very loud ), I kinda just want to cover that side up with maybe an aluminum side panel with ventilation cut out for the CPU cooler. However for the GPU side, since I will most likely be using a color'ed cooling fluid ( preferably a pastel fluid to be able to see the movement through the GPU water blocks ), getting fancy fittings and hard line tubing, getting color matched custom sleeved cabling, and using corsair RGB fans on the radiator and even adding those little LED lights under the water blocks like you did, the GPU side of my case will be more of a "display" side, and for that I would want a full tempered glass side panel, and have the case oriented on my desk to show this side off. Is this at all possible?
Here is a picture of the CPU cooler ( Dynatron R30 ) by the way:
Here is a picture of the CPU cooler ( Dynatron R30 ) by the way:
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I would rather see a solution on the inside of the case rather than painting or covering up the glass it takes away from the beauty of the case plastic glass top to bottom left to right is beautiful there must be another solution to hide the cables just my opinionI love the PC case @LukeD!
The only thing I'd wish was that it had a top handle.
The form factor looks perfect to be a portable pc to take with me on LAN's..'
Do you guys like the side panels partly painted / partly translucent like this ?
I think it does a good job to hide the cabling mess
I basically took the translucent side panels and painted section on top and front black.
Handels someone might like...
https://mnpctech.com/pc-case-lan-pa...aluminum-case-carry-handles.html#/product/771
Also want to recomend the new gigabyte 1080 mini for saving space. Even smaller than the zotac 1080 ti mini. You could even mod the cards for adding an extra tank in the Garrix card side or liquid metal them and have room for 2 more hell you could do quad sli ehh =0
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So I just have one on answer question which is how do you manage to get two graphics cards on a Mini ITX what's the trick I know this might be answered already but I didn't see it do they both go in the same spot with some type of splitter? Could you point me to that information? This is the first mini-itx build that I've seen two graphics cards as most of the Mini ITX motherboards only have one pcie slot so I'm curious it's funny because I have a mini ITX case that I won from lian li. But after looking at the mini ITX motherboards I decided that I wanted to go with an m-atx which led mean to the video from Linus and then the thread so just trying to figure out if I should go with matx or ITX is it actually possible to have SLI on ITX if so what are the options?
@Jackrabbit72380 You need a mother board that supports bifurcation of the single PCIex16 slot and a bifurcating riser (goes in the 1 x16 slot and maps the data lanes to 2 x8 (electrically) PCie slots). There are threads in these forums discussing bifurcation.
okay I'm guessing there's only a few ITX motherboards that do this? what are the common ones? So now we're not limited on the SLI side but what about the ram is there a solution to that? What is the most you can have and is it going to limit you in anyway?
Gigabyte just came out with the 1080 Mini looking at project Orpheus I'm wondering if quad SLI is possible in a small form factor? Using an M ITX motherboard that supports bifurcate ing and the world's first and only smallest Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 the...
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1080 DirectX 12 GV-N1080IX-8GD 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5X PCI Express
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@Jackrabbit72380 pretty much the entire line up of Asrock mini ITX board support this feature. As for ram, I'm going to be using Asrock's x299e ITX/ac board because it has 3 m.2 slots and quad channel memory in the form of SODIMM's for up to 64gb of ram all packed into the mini ITX form factor. It also happens to support this PCIe feature so it's literally a perfect choice.
Also taking a look at that mini 1080 you mentioned, that looks too tall to fit two on top of each other and adding two more wouldn't be possible because SLI requires 8 lanes, and splitting the 16 lane connection would result in 4 lanes each. Plus cooling them and finding a good way to position them would be very impractical and I can tell you water cooling definitely won't be an option. Besides SLI scaling is really crappy after 2 cards anyways so why would you want that.
Also taking a look at that mini 1080 you mentioned, that looks too tall to fit two on top of each other and adding two more wouldn't be possible because SLI requires 8 lanes, and splitting the 16 lane connection would result in 4 lanes each. Plus cooling them and finding a good way to position them would be very impractical and I can tell you water cooling definitely won't be an option. Besides SLI scaling is really crappy after 2 cards anyways so why would you want that.
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@Jackrabbit72380
You won't be able to do quad sli because Nvidia driver actually disables that function even if the cards fit. Furthermore, SLI at least requires 8x lane, which makes perfect sense when bifurcating a 16x -> 8x8x, 16x -> 4x4x4x4x will not work.
Also, project Orpheus:
You won't be able to do quad sli because Nvidia driver actually disables that function even if the cards fit. Furthermore, SLI at least requires 8x lane, which makes perfect sense when bifurcating a 16x -> 8x8x, 16x -> 4x4x4x4x will not work.
Also, project Orpheus:
Sounds like a need for a mining setup, not a gaming setup, we don't currently have gaming grade displays with enough pixels to demand Quad-SLI. Even the Vive Pro probably won't demand that much video processing.
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