hi

and since I live in a small town in italy, not all hardware is easy (cheap) to find

do these thing fit and - that's the most important thing - will be silent enough AND be ok from a thermal
point of view?

lian li q07b
seasonic (s)s12II 430
i5 2500k
big shuriken (would the regular shuriken fit? are there better choices? must be as quiet as it can get)
"vanilla" h61/7 mobo and 4gb ram
optical reader
probably no discrete video card (at least for the time being, 2 years or so)


the cabinet is really tiny (I'd prefer a lanbox lite or aerocool m40 with a micro-atx board, but they're quite hard to find here); the available footprint anyway is very tight: it has to be around or below 30 cm wide, and - most problematic - 37 cm deep including the power cable (that's the real problem, almost all the m-atx cubes won't fit anyway)

I'm trying to get a regular cpu instead of a e350 or atom+ion because of h.264 Hi10p profile (and the lack of hardware acceleration support for it!)



thanks a lot in advance!

Why don't you use an angled power connector?

If you want to use an ATX PSU the Q07 is the smallest option, but it's only 208mm deep. That severely limits the choice of graphic card for a future upgrade (if you want to keep the case).

Some more choices with an ATX PSU:
The Q11 is 260mm deep if seen people cram an AMD 6870 in there, the case bulges just a little in the front. A 6850 or 560 ti should fit nicely.
The SilverStone Sugo SG03 is much bigger, but fits a mini ATX board. You can even use a small water cooler like the Antec H20 620 with the front fan. It fits almost any graphics card, even a 6870 if you remove the lower front fan.

Some choices with smaller PSUs:
The SilverStone Sugo SG05 is much smaller and comes with an integrated SFX (mini ATX) PSU.
These cases have room for taller CPU coolers:
The Chieftec BT-02B comes only with a 180W SFX PSU, and only has room for a low profile card. There's a nice mod in the forum galleries with a similar case, but maybe a different brand (they're all OEM designs anyway).
The Chenbro PC719 is an even smaller desktop with an optional Seasonic TFX PSU and an optional card reader. It holds a mini ATX board, a slim size optical drive and low profile cards.
The Chenbro PC806 is a small desktop with an optional Seasonic TFX PSU. It holds a mini ATX board, a full size optical drive and full height cards. This one is 350mm deep, that may be too much.

thanks for the prompt and detailed reply

i'll look a bit more into it to find the best possible option to fit in the available cramped and wierdly-shaped space


do you think that the q07 could be also critical for the temperatures, with a cpu like the 2500K (96 TDP) ?

Since you can't overclock on a H67/H61 board I'm gonna say no.
Make sure the fan on the Big Shuriken and the PSU Fandon't work against each other. The Fan on the Big Shuriken should blow towards the top of the cooler, where the PSU fan pulls the air out of the case. I don't know what the default orientation is, maybe you have to turn the fan around.

to tell the truth, i was snooping around and i found a z68 itx board (asrock iirc), but I confirm i don't plan to overlock; instead, one use of the z68/k combination could be to downclock the processor more freely - if necessary to obtain a truly quiet system (was thinking about undervolting a little bit, like spcr did when reviewing the 2400 vs 2400s)

thanks again for all the tips!

While I know the 2500K is really popular (I mean, I have one...) I don't believe the Z/K combination is necessary to underclock, just overclock. Further, if you're going to underclock, you can get the same effect, essentially, by using one of the LV chips or just a slower option (like the 2300, since you didn't mention gaming I doubt you have a need for the HD3000 graphics). Can you get the 2400S, 2405S or 2500T where you are? They're about the same price as the 2500K, but under-clocked out of the box. Might just be a simpler way to get the same effect, and you could then certainly go with a cheaper H61/H67. If not, I'd assume you could get the 2300. As a bonus, those chips would have virtualization and some other toys available that are disabled on the K.

Here's another alternative: http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/pr ... =64&g=spec

120 W fanless PSU included, and I think it's small enough. It's new though, so it's still hard to find.

If you can't find it locally, order from Germany, good prices there.

http://geizhals.at/deutschland/?cat=geh ... +Li#xf_top