This build was inspired by Shawn Faherty's Ncase build so thank you for documenting it. This is my first SFF machine and budget had a strong influence in this build. For this reason, there are things that I would have done differently and I'm considering a GPU (980ti?) upgrade, along with a PSU to support it. (Silverstone SFX 600w)
Part list:
I went with the 5820k because I already had one. I have considered the 6700k for its lower power consumption and better single threading performance but I figured the upgrade wasn't worth the trouble and the asrock board seemed nice.
As you probably know, the x99e-ITX/ac has a different cooler mount than most X99 boards. The "narrow ILM" has 4 holes forming a 56mm x 94mm rectangle making it closer to the AMD mount (which is 48mm x 96mm). Some forum post somewhere speculates that mounting the cooler with an AMD bracket using tie wraps may work. That would be impossible because the holes for the mount do not go through the motherboard so there would be no way to attach the tie wraps. That said, it's possible to modify an AMD bracket. This is what I did. I cannot recommend doing this but it's working for me. I bent the AMD brackets slightly and I had to grind the inside with a dremel to compensate for the extra length of the AMD bracket but it fits and it's solid.
There is another issue that had to be overcome with this motherboard. It did not support the 16gb ram sticks until the BIOS was updated. So in order to complete this build, I had to use another stick of ram just so I could access the out of date BIOS to update it.
Finally, I got lucky with the size of the cooler. It barely fits. It touches one of the sata input on the side of the motherboard.
In the end I like the SG13, it's small and very lightweight and It's cheap. The build quality does support a lot from this however. There's a lot of room for improvement here, hopefully there's more to come.
Part list:
- Silverstone SG13B
- i7-5820k currently running at 4.3ghz
- AsRock x99e-ITX/ac
- Enermax Liqtech 120x AIO cpu cooler
- 2x G.Skill 16gb DDR4-3200 15-15-15-35
- Gigabyte GTX970 OC edition (blower type card)
- Silverstone SFX 450w
- Plextor 256gb M.2 ssd
- Sandisk 960gb Ultra II ssd and Sandisk 256gb Ultra.
I went with the 5820k because I already had one. I have considered the 6700k for its lower power consumption and better single threading performance but I figured the upgrade wasn't worth the trouble and the asrock board seemed nice.
As you probably know, the x99e-ITX/ac has a different cooler mount than most X99 boards. The "narrow ILM" has 4 holes forming a 56mm x 94mm rectangle making it closer to the AMD mount (which is 48mm x 96mm). Some forum post somewhere speculates that mounting the cooler with an AMD bracket using tie wraps may work. That would be impossible because the holes for the mount do not go through the motherboard so there would be no way to attach the tie wraps. That said, it's possible to modify an AMD bracket. This is what I did. I cannot recommend doing this but it's working for me. I bent the AMD brackets slightly and I had to grind the inside with a dremel to compensate for the extra length of the AMD bracket but it fits and it's solid.
There is another issue that had to be overcome with this motherboard. It did not support the 16gb ram sticks until the BIOS was updated. So in order to complete this build, I had to use another stick of ram just so I could access the out of date BIOS to update it.
Finally, I got lucky with the size of the cooler. It barely fits. It touches one of the sata input on the side of the motherboard.
In the end I like the SG13, it's small and very lightweight and It's cheap. The build quality does support a lot from this however. There's a lot of room for improvement here, hopefully there's more to come.
