Most people would never build their own small form factor PC, fill it with high-end hardware, liquid-cool it, then overclock it. Luckily, we're not most people
The Mission The interest in small form factor (SFF) computing seems to have reached a fever pitch over the past few months, but boutique system builders tell us they've been selling an S-load of them for some time now. The reason for their popularity is not hard to understand—they pack all the firepower of a full-sized ATX machine but take up half the space due to clever engineering. It takes equally clever building to fit a full-sized video card, an internal power supply, storage devices, and even liquid cooling into such a tiny box. That's no small feat, and to be honest, it sounded like just the kind of challenge that we wanted to take on for Build It. The problem is, the micro-tower form factor hasn't been around very long, so it still has some kinks to work out. We've worked with several of these systems over the past few months, and the degree of usability varies quite a bit. However, Silverstone recently announced the Raven RVZ01, a case that seems to have the ease-of-use that we like; plus, the company has demo'd the chassis using a liquid-cooling system, which we found downright nifty. All we had to do was get our hands on one and go to work.
Birds of a Feather
To construct a PC inside a mini-tower like the Raven, you really have to be prepared to build in a completely different way than you have before, and using some atypical parts, too. For example, in this case (which is a preproduction model, so retail units might differ slightly) the optical drive bay only holds a "slim" design, as its front bezel is less than half the size of a standard 5.25-inch drive. The power supply is also not standard ATX: a Silverstone ST45SF-G from the company's SFF SFX line of PSUs designed for tiny rigs like this. It can't supply as much juice as a full-size ATX power supply because it's so small, but it's still able to throw down 450 watts. Surprisingly, this is actually enough wattage for a system with a single video card and a relatively efficient Intel Haswell CPU.
When we say "single card," we mean any single-GPU card you can find, as there's more than enough room for even super-long boards. We stuffed an Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti into our box and had plenty of room left over (We know at the time of online publish, the 780 Ti is being phased out by the newer GTX 980, but if you act now, you should be able to find them pretty cheap). (We could have fit a dual-GPU card, but the power supply wouldn't be able to handle that.) There's also enough room for a 3.5-inch hard drive in the RVZ01, in addition to two 2.5-inch drives, but we ended up sacrificing our 3.5-inch drive to the liquid-cooling gods. Since we were using an expensive CPU cooler, we figured we might as well go top-shelf all around, so we went with Intel's Core i7-4770K CPU and the Maximum VI Impact motherboard from Asus.
INGREDIENTS
| | PART | Price |
| Case | Silverstone Raven RVZ01 | $100 |
| PSU | Silverstone ST45SF-G 450W | $100 |
| Mobo | Asus Maximus VI Impact | $230 |
| CPU | Intel Core i7-4770K | $325
|
| Cooler | Corsair Hydro H75 | $85 |
| GPU | Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti | $700
|
| RAM | 2x 8GB Corsair Vengeance LP | $160
|
| SSD | Corsair Neutron GTX 480GB | $400
|
| Optical Drive | Silverstone SOD02 8x DVD Burner | $70 |
| Cables | Silverstone PP05-E Flat Power Cable Kit | $25 |
| OS | Windows 8.1 64-bit OEM | $100 |
| Total | | $1,983 |
1. Prey Drive
Since this Build It is more of an experiment than a full-fledged gaming or productivity system, we felt comfortable sticking to just one solid-state drive (SSD) for our storage needs. One of the main benefits of using just an SSD in a small system like this is that it cuts down on the cabling we'd need to wrestle with later, which can take up a surprising amount of space. An SSD is also much smaller than a desktop mechanical drive and makes no noise since it has no moving parts. In the RVZ01, SSDs are mounted on a detachable section that also holds the video card and the optical drive. This design makes the SSD quite easy to access, and adding a second drive is easy, too.
2. Mother-birds
The RVZ01 features an "inverted" design, so we had to flip the Asus Maximus VI Impact motherboard upside down and rotate it 180 degrees, which is why the connectors in the photo look backward. The case's side panel that's behind the motherboard tray is permanently attached, so we had to install the liquid cooler's backplate before we installed the motherboard. This motherboard also has a riser card that needs to be installed if you want to take advantage of the mobo's integrated sound. There's another optional add-in card that offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which contains yet another connector, this time for M.2—the successor to mSATA, which is designed for ultrabooks and other systems too small to fit an SSD. And there's a third pre-installed riser at the bottom of the board containing extra capacitors for overclocking. We removed the riser's two screws, because those holes double as motherboard mounting points. Then we put the I/O shield in the case, followed by the board.
3. Bird on a Wire
Inside this black cage is the junior-sized Silverstone power supply. The cage is attached to the case with four standard screws. Take those out, slide the PSU in with its connectors facing up and its intake fan facing toward the fan grill on the side panel, secure it to the bottom of the cage with the four provided screws, and put the whole thing back in. We routed most of the front-panel wiring underneath the cage, to leave more room up top for other wires. The short flat cables come from Silverstone's PP05-E flat power cable kit, which is sold separately from the PSU. They are highly flexible and a godsend in tight quarters like these.
4. Eagle Eyes
This removable ledge contains the optical drive and a platform for the GPU. As you can see, only a "slim" style of optical drive will fit, and luckily, Silverstone has one named the SOD02, which is an 8x DVD burner. Sure, it's not a BD-R drive and it's not cheap, but if you need an optical drive in this case, you don't have a ton of options. To install it you have to remove the top half of the case's interior by removing six Phillips screws around the rim, and the drive slides into the front. The mounting holes for the optical drive were too small for the heads of the screws that come with the drive, so we couldn't put them in. You need to use the screws that come with the case, instead. The drive was surprisingly snug without the screws anyway, so we just left it "loose" in the slot.
5. Spreading Our Wings
The detachable section is also where we installed the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti. We could shave about $450 off this build and go with a more moderately tuned GPU like a GTX 760, but we wanted to see if both the case and PSU could handle a full-powered and full-sized GPU. We chose the GTX 780 Ti because it's currently the fastest single-GPU available, and produces a decent amount of heat, too. To install it, we had to first plug the GPU into a PCI Express riser card, then attach the PCIe power cables to the card before putting this entire section back into the case; the connectors on the card become inaccessible once it's installed. To make the cabling nice and neat (again, we used those flexible flat cables) we strung them behind the card and curled the cable over the top and into the connectors. Once everything was connected, we plugged the whole contraption back into the case, with the riser pictured below going right into the motherboard's x16 PCIe slot.
6. Survival of the Fittest
CPU cooling duties were handled by a Corsair H75 unit, but to get it to fit we had to swap out the standard 120mm fan, which was too chunky. Instead, we used the slim fan that was pre-installed on the side panel. Although this fan allows us to install the radiator on this super-slim case and still get the door to close, the size of the fan blades mean it won't be able to move as much air as a larger fan. Also, since the fan is thinner we had to use shorter #6-32 3/4-inch machine screws that we bought at a local hardware store to attach it to the radiator. The H75 is a good choice for a small form factor case like this one because of its flexible and relatively narrow tubes. We looped the tubes toward the front of the case, then back, to keep them out of the way of the radiator. We experimented with intake vs. exhaust and push vs. pull; in the end , we went with push exhaust (though pull exhaust is shown in the photos).
Something to Crow About
For a micro-tower, the RVZ01 has particularly accessible areas for the video card, storage devices, and power supply. We've had buzz-killing frustrations installing those components into smaller enclosures before, so the design of this chassis was definitely to our liking. Unfortunately, the case's smaller dimensions meant that cooling was a challenge. The GTX 780 Ti was getting plenty of air, but we struggled to push the CPU beyond its stock specifications. We first ran it up to 4.2GHz, but in extended testing under load, temps were hovering at 90 C when running the x264 encoding benchmark. That's not good, and too hot for our tastes. We've overclocked with the H75 in a tight space before (February 2014 issue), so we knew the cooler could handle the task. Upon investigation, we realized the case's stock "slim" fan that we attached to the Corsair H75's radiator doesn't have a lot of focused air pressure, so it's not great for cooling a rad. (Silverstone makes some excellent high-pressure fans, but they won't fit here.) There's also no intake fan in this part of the case, and no exhaust fans at all. Because of these issues, we ended up running the CPU at stock clocks, but with the motherboard's "Multi-Core Enhancement" pushing all CPU cores to the same speed when under load. Without MCE or manual tweaking, several cores will run below the chip's "turbo boost" rating of 3.9GHz.
We had much better luck with the video card. Despite the GTX 780 Ti having a stock cooler, we were able to overclock the core by 100MHz and the memory by 400MHz (effective), thanks in part to the 120mm intake fan right next to the card. At 4K/UHD, we sustained over 80 FPS in Batman Arkham City, with just PhysX and anti-aliasing disabled. A more demanding game like Hitman Absolution was in the mid-40s, and Tomb Raider (2013) was in the low 30s. That's still very respectable for a single GPU with a stock cooler. Our seemingly "underpowered" 450-watt power supply chugged right along and was totally stable. We plugged in a power meter and discovered that the system didn't draw over 350 watts during the gaming benchmarks, which would be the heaviest real-world usage.
This build was an experiment from the start, so a lack of CPU overclocking was more a learning experience than a shortfall. There's only so much space in a micro-tower to get fancy with CPU cooling. You're probably better off with a "cube" micro-tower for that.
Benchmarks | | ZERO POINT | |
| Premiere Pro CS6 (sec) | 2,000 | 2,544 (-21.2%)
|
| Stitch.Efx 2.0 (sec) | 831 | 829 |
| ProShow Producer 5.0 (sec) | 1,446 | 1415
|
| x264 HD 5.0 (fps) | 21.1 | 17 (-19.5%) |
| Batmans Arkam City (fps) | 76 | 78 |
| 3 DMark 11 | 5,847 | 5,393 (-7.7%) |
The zero-point machine compared here consists of a 3.2GHz Core i7-3930K and 16GB of Corsair DDR3/1600 on an Asus P9X79 Deluxe motherboard. It has a GeForce GTX 690, a Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, and 64-bit Windows 7 Professional.
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