Building a mini-ITX Haswell System with ASUS [video]

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• piroroadkill - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link

  They're not the only choice. There's plenty of choice.
  
  Also, someone probably thinks it looks good. It's good at showing off the innards, because it's at an angle with a large window, which is probably why it was used in this demo.
  
  Different people prefer different things, thus there are products that generally fit most people shocker.

• Subyman - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  When is the mITX board coming out? I can't find it for sale. Newegg only carries an Asrock board for mITX Z87. Also, I like how "first boot" goes directly into Windows :p

• epobirs - Thursday, June 20, 2013 - link

  Probably they tested the setup before mounting it, including running the Windows install.
  
  It common practice for those who do enough builds to have an external ATX button set you can run without a case. Also, lot of higher-end boards these days have power and reset buttons directly on the board, which is very convenient for testing, OC configurations, or just different case layouts. There isn't room for those on a mini-ITX board but the adapters I already mentioned are out there.

• GazonkFoo - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  the case is nice for the sole purpose of filming the assembly of a mini-itx system (great look-in). but this is probably the last case i would buy for my mini-itx setup. incredible waste of space, unhandy and frickin ugly.

• apinkel - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  @ edmoncu. I agree. Nothing is ever perfect. But the great thing is that there are almost always other options that might be a better fit.

• apinkel - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  To clarify I was agreeing with the comment about the glass. IMO exposing too much of the internal PC is a bad idea and does show a lack of design discipline.
  
  The cost/ugly portion of the post seem like buyer's personal decisions that hopefully are carefully weighed before the buy button is pressed. Unfortunately, on a build, sometimes the costs can escalated part way thru the build. When that happens you do have to roll with the punches as best you can.

• Laststop311 - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  It's a good concept and a pretty fair compromise in performance but I have a sneaking suspicion that system is going to run hotter then I would like. I may be in the minority but this is a desktop we are talking about. I don't know about you guys but I move my desktop maybe 4 times a year when im cleaning it out. So I really have no problems or sadness using a larger case I use the silverstone rv02 with the rotated motherboard so the IO is coming out the back. It's a really awesome design with 3 180mm fans blowing cold air from the bottom over everything to exhause hot out the top. Heat naturally rises so this helps immensely from keeping the heat of the components effecting each other and leads to a nice steady supply of cold air for the heatsink fans allowing you to run all the fans at low speed and still be under 75C under full load on the cpu and under 80 on the gpu which is a gtx titan and the cpu is an i7-980x. If I put the fans on high it is STILL stupidly quiet and I can extract quite an overclock while keeping temps very chilly. This is an awesome designed case and does just as good as the 70 dollar more ft02 version its just not all metal.
  
  I Know the case weighs 27 pounds empty which unless you are pathetically weak is not that hard to move the few times you need to clean it. Probably 50 pounds fully loaded. I got alot of stuff. A 256GB Samsung 840 pro boot drive/program installation drive and 8x 3TB WD black in software RAID 5. When I can afford another 8 bay nas box Ill upgrade these to the 4TB WD blacks but funds wont allow that.
  
  I'm a big movie buff and I store my movies that I encode myself and my movies end up being about 15-20GB each in size with an identical picture to the original blu ray. I already have a lot of nas's from upgrades over the years. A 3 bay raid 5 with 3x 1TB WD black RE that I use for all my business and personal non media backup. I have a 5 bay raid 5 with 5x 2TB WD green which has all music and movies all music stored in varying flac qualities depending on the source to preserve all the quality. I have a 8 bay i just filled with 8x 3tb wd red drives in raid 5 to expand my movie storage capabilities. And I have 8x WD black 3TB in my main desktop the is mainly storing copies of all my hardest to replace most important favorite things as a second copy to stuff already on the nas's as you can't trust just raid with your most important stuff 2 seperate raid systems is pretty good though.
  
  I'm probably in the minority as I am a data junky because of movies and when 4k takes off it is going to be really tough i hope we have a major breaktrhough in hard drives by that time that gives us 10-15GB per drive as the norm so I can keep up with storing 4k movies.

• apinkel - Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - link

  Point taken on the case design. Really underlines the importance of doing your homework and touching base with other folks before starting your build.
  
  That does sound like a lot of stuff. I used to keep everything. I now have a fairly streamlined system that meets my needs but doesn't have a lot of extra stuff that just makes it harder/more expensive to maintain. This has really made backup and recovery so much easier. The more stuff you have and the more complex the system you have the harder it is to back it up and recover it in the case of a failure.

• cjs150 - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link

  Laststop311: Pleasure to see there is another data junkie with an extensive blu-ray ripped collection. That is one impressive list of NASs! I cannot compete - I am humbled

• Ananke - Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - link

  I have pretty much the same systems :), you are not alone. I just bought several IB CPUs on great sales, Celerons and i3, to have spares for future builds. Haswell is no good :):). That Lian Li is pointless case - too large and no functional.