Monday, July 4, 2022

small form factor.... medium sized gamer

 This system is housed in a zzaw b2 case. this case is 3mm thick aluminum, which feels pretty high quality.


as you can see here, the case is sandwich style, using a sfx sized power supply to run parts on both sides of a divider.

This build is a pure gamer, with stress on the gpu, and cooling.

at the top, there are 2 of the ultra quiet 120 by 25 mm fans from noctua. the power supply is positioned with the intake toward the vented panel, and the output facing the exhaust fan. these fans are expensive, but they are entirely silent at 1000 rpm or less.

I used the corsair 750 watt sfx, which happens to have a fanless mode for lower energy demands. the way that the psu is positioned, the exhaust fans draw air though it, lowering it's temperature and further delaying the fan operation.

I used an old intel board with the i5 9400 processor.  this processor got a bad rep because it cost as much as a 12 or 16 thread AMD processor, but it has only 6 cores with no multi threading. just 6 threads. and guess what? for the games that I play, 6 cores that can hold 4.5 gHz can keep up with a very perky gpu.

i used the very low profile l9 [low profile, 92 mm fan] cooler from noctua to drain heat from the chip.

this leaves room for a much larger fan that blows air right around the heatsink to cool the other components. this is a noctua 140 by 25 mm fan. It turns at half the speed, but moves several times as much air.


for the gpu, i chose the ASUS tough rtx 3080, and was able to get the later version with 12 gigs of fast vram. This thing is a tank, with a full heavy back plate, and a metal 3 fan array that really goes fast.

It has no frills, other than an led to light the logo [everything must  glow!], and a little switch that tells it if you want the fan to shut off at light load. from experience, you want to allow air to flow freely through your case without passing through filters, and to clean off the innards pretty often as they get coated with dust. It is a little oven while gaming, and every degree cooler means as more frames per second.


You should always use the quiet mode, because it does not adversely affect performance. the card will make a real racket when the gaming gets busy, but it will not get warm, or stutter. As you can see, the exhaust fans are arranged to pull air through the gpu heatsink and then exhaust it out the top, so again, the temperature that triggers the fans to spin up are not reached very quickly. 

if you try this same combo, you will have to take off the end of the case with the screws and spacers that hold it, and insert the giant gpu from the open end. It is a little hard to get the screws and spacers back in with the high volume gpu! this card comes very close to the solid front panel, and it is actually threaded for a standard sized screw [times 2] If this card was not so rigid, i would have predrilled holes, and bolted it in solid.

As usual with these builds, the screw holes for the end of the riser cable do not line up with the threaded inserts in the case. a single zip tie at lower center holds it at the right orientation. The reason is that there are 100 different kinds of riser cable, and it is enough to confuse even the case makers!



and finally, please meet my assistant Yang.

he is a grey long limbed box cat.

you can look them up on you tube.

this boxcat can be used for size.......



the b2 case is well larger than the boxcat. by comparison, the smaller A1 case that contains my portable gamer fits inside of the yellow case. These small form factor builds are obviously not water resistant or sturdy enough to take blows, so they need to travel in a  padded case.


update:

i purchased a larger case for my medium gaming system. it is now housed in a Sliger b610 case. If you are not familiar with Sliger, they are a custom case maker based out of nevada. Cases are 200 to 300 dollars, and have nearly perfect, no nonsense machining. this larger case allows a tall cooler, and several hard drives. It is not sandwich style, like the zzaw case, so it does not require a riser cable for the graphics card.  more fans can live in the case, so that continuous gaming will not cause it to warm up.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. No misinformation or personal attacks are allowed. [yes, since it is my blog, i get to decide what is information and what is misinformation].

Pages

Followers

About Me

My photo
I was a traveling climbing shoe repairman. Now, i take care of remote property, and attempt to create a new kind of lifestyle using portable buildings with solar power and passive solar heating.