This article was published in the April 2015 issue of Maximum PC. For more trusted reviews and feature stories, subscribe here.
Check out our full review of the sweet Corsair case used in this build.
Get some meaty gaming muscle on the go with this portable powerhouse
Length of Time: 2-4 Hours | Difficulty: Medium
The Mission
Last month we built a portable PC featuring the Sapphire ITX Compact R9 285—an AMD Radeon GPU which is roughly on par with a GeForce GTX 960, but short enough to fit in an ITX case. To keep things evenhanded, we're going with Nvidia this month. Our Asus GTX 970 DC Mini is at a higher tier of performance and also features twice as much VRAM. (You may have heard recently that the 970's VRAM is divided into two pools, with the smaller one performing more slowly, but it's only a few percentage points different.) AMD has the Radeon R9 290, which performs about the same as a 970, but it requires a lot more power, and there isn't one short enough to fit into an ITX case.
Generally speaking, these compact videocards have changed portable PC gaming a lot. Not all of the systems they go into are made equal, though, so we have to survey the landscape periodically to figure out what's hot and what's not.
LAN of Opportunity
Option for its modularity and low price, but we decided to go with a cube shape this time, instead of a shoebox. This makes the case easier to balance when it has an integrated handle, like we see on this Corsair Graphite 380T. Thanks to its larger dimensions in the front, the 380T can also fit a 200mm intake fan, though it ships with a 140mm unit in front (and a 120mm exhaust fan in back). You can also fit two 120mm fans on the side, or a 240mm radiator. We, of course, went with the radiator option, specifically the trusty Corsair Hydro H100i. We had one handy, and using the same brand for the CPU cooler and the case tends to cut down on incompatibility.
The 380T can fit a videocard up to 11.4 inches long, but we preferred the shorty GTX 970 to give us some room to breathe. This plugs into an Asus Maximus VII Impact, which is a fancy ITX mobo that uses Intel's Z97 chipset. On CPU duty is the Core i7-4790K, which was the beefiest chip we could put in this mobo. Powering the whole shebang is a gold-rated Cooler Master V550. For storage, we have just a single SSD, since this unit is purpose-built for LAN gaming. The 380T will fit up to two 3.5-inch drives, though, and up to four 2.5-inch drives.
1. Method to the Madness
Mini-ITX cases, in our experience, all tend to have a number of their own little quirks and unusual deviations. Luckily, however, they generally all make sense when placed in context. This plate, for example, craftily unscrews from the back and allows you to slide in a power supply through the rear of the case. If you're wondering why, well, it's because this case doesn't have enough room to install the PSU from the side.
The 380T can take a PSU up to 180mm long, but you'll have to account for PSU cables, too, if you want to keep hold of the drive cage that's right next to it. That's why we opted for the V550 PSU, which is is 140mm long— we wouldn't recommend pushing very far past 150mm. Connect your modular cables before sliding the PSU in, too, as it's cramped on the other side.
2. Room with a View
The two side windows of the 380T come off just by pulling on their handles. As you can see from the topdown photo, though, the mobo is obscured, leading to some tactical considerations. For example, your CPU cooler must be attached to the mobo before they go in the case or you won't be able to screw down the cooler. You can get around it with a short enough screwdriver, but then you don't have much torque.
If you're using a cooler with a radiator attached, you must pull the rad through first. Our 240mm rad also barely fit lengthwise, though the case could accommodate one that's thicker than normal. For the best airflow, we'd recommend pointing the rad's fans on the inside, blowing outward and through it.
3. I'm Your Biggest Fan
To pop off the front grill , just push its upper-left and upper-right corners until you hear them click, and it's released. The stock 140mm intake fan can be replaced with two 120mm fans or one 200mm fan—the largest option will be the quietest (though you can get high-performance fans at any size). The round holes on each corner are for threading the fan's power cable back into the case. This fan lights up with a white LED, but there's a tiny switch next to the handle in the top of the case that can toggle that off. And just FYI, there's no room in front for another radiator.
4. Cool Customers
From the other side of the case you can see just how tightly the CPU cooler's radiator is tucked in there. The tubes also have to be oriented to go into the rad on the far end of the case. If you try to orient the tubes to come out near the motherboard, they will be obstructed by the case's exhaust fan. You could remove the exhaust fan, but you'd sacrifice a lot of airflow. And we didn't notice it at first, but a partially hidden screw also allows you to remove the drive cage, so you could install a pump and a small reservoir if you wanted to do a custom water loop. You can also get pumps that integrate their own res, but a res that small also restricts how much you can cool—you'd be able to do a GPU or a CPU, but probably not both.
5. Control Freaks
You might wonder how a Mini-ITX case could cost $150. One of the reasons is the integrated three-speed fan controller. In our scenario, we used this to control the front and rear fan. We could've plugged in the CPU cooler pump as well, but you want to either run that at full speed, or let it use PWM temperature measurements to regulate its own speed. So we plugged the pump into the spare motherboard fan header instead. The cable on the stock exhaust fan is plenty long enough to reach these connectors. There's a fat button on the top of the case with a fan icon on it, and you just press that to cycle through each speed setting.
The controller itself gets juice through a SATA power connector, so make sure you've a spare before you install all your SATA-based storage devices. Our CPU cooler also uses a SATA power connector, so we'd need a second cable of that type to install more than two SATA drives.
6. Popping Locks
Sometimes the trick isn't w ith the case, but with the hardware inside it. During the course of building a PC, especially one as unique as this one, you will often have to undo a few steps and work your way back. If you aren't familiar with this motherboard, that could prove a little challenging. Most boards use locking mechanisms on the videocard slot to make sure the card doesn't slide out accidentally. This one has an actual spring-loaded latch with a small knob that goes through a notch in the card, rather than a lever-like handle that you can just push out of the way (usually with a spare slot cover).
1.) Here's the switch to turn off the LED on the front intake fan. You can't reach it from outside, but the side panel pops off easily. 2.) The Asus GTX 970 DC Mini needs only one 8-pin PCI Express power cable to run, so it doesn't need a fancy power supply. 3.) You have nearly five inches of space between the end of this videocard and the front of the case, so your cable routing can still be a little relaxed. 4.) This is a rotated drive cage that can hold two 2.5-inch drives. We'd definitely recommend right-angle SATA data cables here.
Sunny Side Up
One of the nice things about these compact ITX cases is that you can rotate and tip them easily, during and after the build process. The side panels on the Corsair 380T also come off with a flick of the wrist, so gaining access to any angle of the system is a breeze. Speaking of breezes, the large grills on the panels, plus the large front grill on the front and the exhaust fan on the back, make for some serious airflow. We had no trouble keeping this system ventilated. The shorty GTX 970 videocard did make more noise than a card of standard length, so we'd recommend a fulllength card if your ears are sensitive to that. Just make sure you stay comfortably under that 11.4-inch limit.
CPU cooler height is also limited to 150mm, which will eliminate a number of tower-style air coolers from consideration. So we'd recommend a closed-loop cooler if you can afford one and are overclocking. It has to be either 120mm or 240mm, mind; the bracket doesn't fit 140mm or 280mm radiators or fans.
We also debated whether to go with an Intel Core i5 or i7 CPU. The latter is more or less an i5 with Hyper-Threading. HT gives you four additional CPU threads, for a total of eight, but it's not like having four extra physical cores. They're more like a simulation. Still, since Direct3D 12 and Mantle let your videocard communicate with multiple CPU threads at the same time (DirectX 11 and earlier versions only talk to one CPU thread at a time), having a lot of threads could boost performance in future games, depending on how they handle this new feature. In the end, we were already spending nearly $1,500 on this system before we'd added the CPU, so adding a $100 premium for the i7 wasn't a big deal.
Either way, you'll get some pretty snappy performance from this system. It took well under 30 seconds to do a full reboot, which helps a lot when installing Windows, Windows updates, drivers, and certain software. Our GTX 970 averaged over 80fps in Batman: Arkham City with 4xMSAA and everything else maxed out (though we did disable PhysX). With a whopping 4GHz base clock, our Core i7-4790K whipped through all the benchmarks like a samurai sword (on a core count basis, that is). In fact, it might be time to retire our legendary zero-point system and replace it with something even heavier.
