You can build an SFF (small form factor) PC no problem. It’s harder and more expensive due to the clearances and parts being more niche, but I would highly recommend it.
I have an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 5800x in mine, all under 16l in volume, without any compromises.
It’s nice to take your PC to a friend to make a mini LAN party
I stuffed a Ryzen 5700X3D and a Radeon 9070XT in an 11L Lian Li x Dan A4-H2O. It wasn’t easy to get all the cables and such routed correctly, but it fit. (Well, except that I did have to give up on having a 3.5" hard drive, but aside from that.)
Ironically, I had originally intended to keep using my old Antec ISK-600 (which was also a mini-ITX case, but larger – not sure how large, as it came out before they started measuring cases in liters). Unfortunately, as I had little time to research which particular 9070XT variant to get while standing in line on launch day, I accidentally picked the wrong one and it was >2 slots, so I had to change my case. Then because I found an open-box A4-H2O, that snowballed into swapping my ATX PSU for an SFX one, and my 120mm AIO for a 240mm AIO with slightly more flexible tubes because that’s how tightly packed it had to be.
I had a storage server (NAS) even before I went the SFF route, so there was little to sacrifice. Too bad the server wouldn’t fit in a nice SFF case.
I haven’t gotten around to putting it together yet, but that’s what my ISK-600 is going to become. Believe it or not, that thing can hold 3 3.5" drives and two 2.5" drives (or a slim optical drive, but nobody uses those anymore).
Nice, hope you’ll have fun building and deploying your server.
Cases like NR200 would also fit a few 3.5" drives, but the reason I couldn’t fit my current server into a SFF-ish case is that the mobo is mATX and I have all PCIe slots full. Most of the SFF cases (even if they fit mATX) not enough space for my PCIe needs.
I could upgrade to a built-in NVMe and SFP+ (or downgrade to 2.5GbE), but I don’t want to spend that kind of money just to save some space I don’t really need to save.
I hadn’t owned a PC for many years (laptops) and decided I wanted to get one.
I thought I’d be able to get a nice little form factor.
Then I saw the size of the video card, the huge cooler for the CPU, mobo and PS to support them, and,.well haha, here I am.
You can build an SFF (small form factor) PC no problem. It’s harder and more expensive due to the clearances and parts being more niche, but I would highly recommend it.
I have an RTX 3080 and Ryzen 5800x in mine, all under 16l in volume, without any compromises.
It’s nice to take your PC to a friend to make a mini LAN party
I stuffed a Ryzen 5700X3D and a Radeon 9070XT in an 11L Lian Li x Dan A4-H2O. It wasn’t easy to get all the cables and such routed correctly, but it fit. (Well, except that I did have to give up on having a 3.5" hard drive, but aside from that.)
Ironically, I had originally intended to keep using my old Antec ISK-600 (which was also a mini-ITX case, but larger – not sure how large, as it came out before they started measuring cases in liters). Unfortunately, as I had little time to research which particular 9070XT variant to get while standing in line on launch day, I accidentally picked the wrong one and it was >2 slots, so I had to change my case. Then because I found an open-box A4-H2O, that snowballed into swapping my ATX PSU for an SFX one, and my 120mm AIO for a 240mm AIO with slightly more flexible tubes because that’s how tightly packed it had to be.
I currently have the Ncase M2, since I prefer air cooling. I don’t have a pic of the PC in the M2, but here it is in the Cooler Master NR200:
I had a storage server (NAS) even before I went the SFF route, so there was little to sacrifice. Too bad the server wouldn’t fit in a nice SFF case.
I haven’t gotten around to putting it together yet, but that’s what my ISK-600 is going to become. Believe it or not, that thing can hold 3 3.5" drives and two 2.5" drives (or a slim optical drive, but nobody uses those anymore).
Nice, hope you’ll have fun building and deploying your server.
Cases like NR200 would also fit a few 3.5" drives, but the reason I couldn’t fit my current server into a SFF-ish case is that the mobo is mATX and I have all PCIe slots full. Most of the SFF cases (even if they fit mATX) not enough space for my PCIe needs.
I could upgrade to a built-in NVMe and SFP+ (or downgrade to 2.5GbE), but I don’t want to spend that kind of money just to save some space I don’t really need to save.
In my experience 2.5" drives are much less prone to failure, so I’m not buying a 3.5" again, unless maybe super cheap just for torrents.