Armed with an EVGA Z77 Stinger, a Bitfenix Prodigy, and a load of Corsair kit, Mark sets out to build a small gaming rig with big performance.
As some of you may remember, last year I built a PC. But not just any PC. My aim, at the time, was to build something powerful enough to play Battlefield 3, and do some video and audio editing. The result was a bit of a monster. Housed inside a full size Corsair 650D case, the rig sported a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, an 850 Watt PSU, an SSD, and an Nvidia GTX 570. Having lived with it for year, and having added a few extra hard drives and LED lights, something dawned on me: do I need this much power? Or, more appropriately, do I need a PC this big?
For those of you who aren't familiar with the joys of living in London, the flats here are pretty small--unless you've got stupid amounts of money to throw around. So in my tiny bedroom in North London, the 650D simply takes up too much space, even if--with all its hard drive racks, drive bays, and PCI slots--it's a great case to expand into. But if expanding isn't something I'd really done over the past year, why would I start now? I don't plan on running a huge RAID array for example, or more than one graphics card in SLI or Crossfire.
Without the need for all that space, a smaller case is certainly an option. And it's not like it would be an entirely foreign endeavour. Earlier this year I built a £300 "Steam Box" PC based on a Micro ATX motherboard, which worked like a charm. Sure, it wasn't the sexiest-looking PC out there, nor--thanks to the budget constraints--was it the smallest, but as a proof of concept it was a good one. For my own build I wanted to go even smaller, sexier, and still have something incredibly powerful to use for gaming and multimedia work. That left only one option: Mini ITX.
"I wanted to go even smaller, sexier, and still have something incredibly powerful…"
Mini ITX boards have come on leaps and bounds over the past few years. Originally developed by electronics manufacturer VIA Technologies in 2001 for embedded systems like set top boxes, Mini ITX motherboards now sport many of the same features as full size ATX boards. In the case of Intel's latest Z77 chipset, that means overclocking support for Core i7/i5/ Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors, PCIe 3.0, USB 3, and SATA 6G. What you give up is largely the amount of expansion slots. Generally, there's only one PCIe slot (so no extra sound card or capture device), two DIMM slots for RAM, and just four SATA ports.
It really is worth looking at those limitations if you're considering going with Mini-ITX as I have. Although you can do a lot with external devices now, especially those based on USB 3, there are some things like graphics cards and extra SATA ports that can only be had via the magic of PCIe.
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