Hot PC in a Silverstone SG05 case

[John Tauwhare]

I want an HTPC and part-time business computer, so I've decided to build one using a Haswell CPU, water cooling, and a very small case no more than 8" high.

The Silverstone SG05 is 7" high, 8" wide and 11" long so it fits the space I have under the TV. I got a bare case in the off-white colour.

 

[John Tauwhare]

The first problem is that the disks assembly doesn't fit behind the radiator.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Viewed from the bottom, the hard disk mount is in the way.



It has to come off.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Beneath that is the 2.5" mount.



That will have to be trimmed.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Removed it, and did some jigsaw work.



And reattached with rivets.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Ready to mount a 120GB OCZ Vector SSD and a Hitachi 500GB 2.5" HDD pulled from a laptop.



Disk drives mounted.

 

[John Tauwhare]

i5-4670K in an ASUS Z87I-PRO mobo



And a Zalman LQ315 closed loop water cooler with the original 120mm fan.



Mounted with Noctua NT-H1 paste (based on IDC's research in his 3770k delid thread).

My main PC donated half its RAM: 2 x 4Gb G.Skill ARES 1866.

 

[John Tauwhare]

At this point I decided to increase the incoming airflow.



This meant opening up the front panel of the frame. More work for the jigsaw on a very awkward and flimsy piece of metal.



And I added a few more holes at the back as well.

 

[John Tauwhare]

research identified the Thermalright TY-141 PWM fan as a good 140mm performer with 120mm mounting holes.



I needed to conceal the metal colour and Warhammer Plague Brown paint was a good match.

The plastic front finishing panel also need work to increase the intake size.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Reassembled. The disk drive mount now fits flush to the front. The PSU is a Silverstone 450 SFX unit. Forget fancy cable routing, everything is just squeezed in.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Going round the case:

Cable side. You can see how the SSD+HDD just fit behind the rad.





Back.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Graphics card side. The radiator restricts the length of card but a Zotac GTX760 AMP! fits ok and is more than fast enough for my purposes.



Awkward job getting it in there though, and wired up.



That's a tight fit!

 

[John Tauwhare]

Lid on.



And I found a finger guard grille on eBay. Not the best finish but it works.



I've got plans to paint the case but first I really want to start it up. But nearly midnight her now so that's for tomorrow..

 

[Raduque]

Looks well and truly packed in there. Maybe a modular PSU would be a better choice?

Your jigsaw work is quite good.

 

[John Tauwhare]

Looks well and truly packed in there. Maybe a modular PSU would be a better choice?

Your jigsaw work is quite good.

If only. Alas, in the SFX size at 450W there is a choice of one in the UK, and it's not modular :\

 

[John Tauwhare]

I installed Windows 7 and MS Office 365. For initial test runs, to get the feel of the CPU, motherboard,overclocking options and temps, I used an Excel benchmark that's very single threaded and imposes a low load on the CPU and is typical of the sort of work I do on my PC.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/87381454/EXCEL-SPEEDTEST-v1-(John-Tauwhare).xlsb

There was a cold gale blowing outside so by opening the window I got an ambient of about 16C. I kept the fans at max. At 4.9GHz the core temps were around 55C.



I got two runs at 4.9GHz then a BSOD. Not willing to go above 1.45V even at low load but I'm happy with these results as they suggest I could set 4.5GHz and 1.2V for day to day use (temps around 40C).