This journey began because my TinyMiniMicro Lenovo M920Q just wasn't cutting it anymore.
While it is absolutely tiny, it's just too noisy under heaver loads and I really needed more than 64G ram, and a bit more expandability.
Requirements were - fast, small, quiet under load, IPMI, expandable, and capable of running ESXi, Proxmox etc.
I wanted to keep things as small as possible, so I started looking at MITX and MATX enclosures to see how small they can be.
I very nearly went with an MITX system, but I had an Asrock Rack X470D4U and a 5600X on hand and I felt I could squeeze it into something pretty small.
It would be fun to build another even smaller system using the Asrock X570D4I-2T or ROMED4ID-2T
The power button ends up on the bottom, but that doesn't matter because we have full control through IPMI
Idle power consumption measured with a Kill-a-watt when fully booted with ESXi 6.7 and no VM's running is ~38W
You can go significantly smaller if you use a low profile air cooler, so I also ordered an SGPC K59 case which is only 7.95L and 10.08 x 3.67 x 13.15 inches! It does require a FlexATX PSU, which can be noisy, but it still fits an MATX motherboard and has 2 PCIe slots
While it is absolutely tiny, it's just too noisy under heaver loads and I really needed more than 64G ram, and a bit more expandability.
Requirements were - fast, small, quiet under load, IPMI, expandable, and capable of running ESXi, Proxmox etc.
I wanted to keep things as small as possible, so I started looking at MITX and MATX enclosures to see how small they can be.
I very nearly went with an MITX system, but I had an Asrock Rack X470D4U and a 5600X on hand and I felt I could squeeze it into something pretty small.
It would be fun to build another even smaller system using the Asrock X570D4I-2T or ROMED4ID-2T
- Case: ZZAW C2 - 13.8L and 12.83 x 6.34 x 10.31 inches
- Mainboard: Asrock Rack X470D4U (MATX)
- CPU: Ryzen 5600X ( 6C / 12T)
- Cooler: Artic Liquid Freezer II 120mm AIO, top mounted exhaust
- Case Fan: Noctua 120mm as bottom intake
- Memory: 2 x 32GB UDIMMS
- PSU: Corsair SF450 SFX (80+ Gold certified)
- Boot drive: Sandisk USB (ESXi 6.7)
- Storage: AOC-SLG3-2M2 PCIe Add-On card, with an Intel 660p 2TB NVME and ADATA SX8200 1TB NVME
- Network: Mellanox CX3
The power button ends up on the bottom, but that doesn't matter because we have full control through IPMI
Idle power consumption measured with a Kill-a-watt when fully booted with ESXi 6.7 and no VM's running is ~38W
You can go significantly smaller if you use a low profile air cooler, so I also ordered an SGPC K59 case which is only 7.95L and 10.08 x 3.67 x 13.15 inches! It does require a FlexATX PSU, which can be noisy, but it still fits an MATX motherboard and has 2 PCIe slots
