My Mobo and processor died - Thinking of building that SFF I always wanted

[maonayze]

Hi Guys

A few days ago my mobo/processor just gave up the ghost and so I thought maybe this is a great time to build that SFF PC I have always wanted. I have a bit of an idea where I want to go with it but your advice would be appreciated.

Here is what I have been looking at so far....

Good ITX/mATX mobo with option of having 2 GFX cards in SLI/XFire (Are there any ITX boards with this option?)

An mATX/ITX case that will take a full ATX PSU and a Sapphire Fury Tri-X (Current card)

Good Watercooling AIO for the processor (Something like Corsair Hydro series)

X99 or Z170 ? (My current board is a Z77 board so I am not up to spec with these newer chipsets) what are the main differences etc... apart from cost.

I am going for 16GB Ram this time, so any advice on make/frequency would be appreciated.

I was going to wait to see if ZEN would finally come good before upgrading, but under the current circumstances I now cannot wait until 2017 so I guess it's Skylake or Haswell-E for me.

I would like to keep options open for the future but I am open to suggestions.

If any of you own any combinations of kit that suit any of the above then feel free to give me your thoughts. Oh, I mainly use the PC for gaming, internet and watching movies and TV.

thanks

Mayo

 

[Alexreffand]

If you must maintain compatibility for multi-GPU, it's going to be the biggest limiting factor for size. There's a thread in this forum on ITX PCIe bifurcation, but even then a case for that is going to need to support mATX unless you're doing a custom liquid cooling system, and based on your desire for an AIO cooler for the CPU, I'm assuming that's not what you were hoping for. Basically you're looking for mATX then, and a case for that is going to average twice the size of an equivalent ITX case. As far as I know, the Silverstone SG09 is the smallest case that still has what you're looking for in compatibility, but that's just based on what I personally remember. Room for two GPUs, mATX motherboard, ATX power supply, all that good stuff.

While I can't personally vouch for any current motherboards (I'm still using an Ivy Bridge i5) I can say that you'd be better off looking for z170 and Skylake, since games rarely use more than 4 physical cores and the games that rely on single-thread performance will actually perform worse on more lower-clocked cores. It'll also save you quite a bit of money, but I assume that's not a consideration here.

So what I personally can recommend is Core i7 6700 CPU and Silverstone SG09 case. Someone with more experience will have to fill in the blanks or correct me if I missed something, but it's a start at least.

 

[maonayze]

Yeah, Core i7 6700 is what I 'd like to get and it probably will be Z170 chipset board (Currently looking at Gigabyte Z170 Gaming 5 and Asus Rog VIII Gene). I will look up the SG09 though, thanks.