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Titan ITX status. (placeholder)

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Consider the realease date of that card- Palit gts450. They are much smaller now:

Sapphire HD7750 low-profile

Club 3D HD7750

Zotac GTX 650 low profile

They are all about 17 cm in length. Just about a Mini ITX board.

Of course there is interest. ME :D Ever since I saw this little bugger. That's my home modding project. But I just want a scaled down version of Silverstone FT02- most beautiful case evar ;) Good thing, good people have it on SketchUp for me.

I know it's been around awhile but their cooling system is how everyone should be doing half-height cards, or every video card for that matter. There's zero advantage using heatsinks with axial fans that blow hot air everywhere INSIDE the already cramped space of a SFF chassis. If I built a system like that it would be much smaller, very optimized, and it looks like I'd have to make my own GPU coolers too. :banghead: Those 1U PSUs are also an issue.

I'm going to keep playing with one of the other designs because I'd still like to build the smallest ITX chassis I can that supports high end gaming. Right now it's 11.6(w) x 10.75(d) x 2.5"(h), has 300w internally and full height double wide GPU up to 10" or roughly a HD4870 sized card. I'm killing time while waiting for parts. :D

mini.JPG
 
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I know it's been around awhile but their cooling system is how everyone should be doing half-height cards, or every video card for that matter. There's zero advantage using heatsinks with axial fans that blow hot air everywhere INSIDE the already cramped space of a SFF chassis. If I built a system like that it would be much smaller, very optimized, and it looks like I'd have to make my own GPU coolers too. :banghead: Those 1U PSUs are also an issue.

I'm going to keep playing with one of the other designs because I'd still like to build the smallest ITX chassis I can that supports high end gaming. Right now it's 11.6(w) x 10.75(d) x 2.5"(h), has 300w internally and full height double wide GPU up to 10" or roughly a HD4870 sized card. I'm killing time while waiting for parts. :D

http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=52268&stc=1&d=1376787900

*Nvdia's Volta GPU will be shrunk down considerably, when they enable the ram to be stacked on top of each other. This should equate to a high end GPU with half height form factor (or at least the card should be 7-8" long) compared to the standard 10-11" gtx680> I picked up a GTX 680 for my build and the length specs are way off> the card specs at 10.5" when in fact it's close to 11".

How does this relate to small itx chassis form factor? It means the next gen of Nvidia gpus will be shrunk down in size and reduced power consumption could be run off a 300-400 PSU with no issue. Small gaming gpu card with the 10X the performance of whats availlable now.




Volta will bring a new way of creating photo realistic graphics> what this means possibly is that now the card can render shades, objects and textures...take that data...store it in the ram where it now can be used by the gpu when it needs to recall those effects...the ram will be capable of storing 1TB of data it can access at any time...basically if you want to compare it to how games will work...take a vehicle as an object in an environment, in that environment requires hundreds of textures and shades to be rendred...the gpu can do this but not in real time...so all those shades and textures are now stored in the ram...and called upon moment by moment as the frames progress, thus creating a more realistic lighting effect that allows to gpu to do other functions. :rockout:
 
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*Nvdia's Volta GPU will be shrunk down considerably, when they enable the ram to be stacked on top of each other. This should equate to a high end GPU with half height form factor (or at least the card should be 7-8" long) compared to the standard 10-11" gtx680> I picked up a GTX 680 for my build and the length specs are way off> the card specs at 10.5" when in fact it's close to 11".

How does this relate to small itx chassis form factor? It means the next gen of Nvidia gpus will be shrunk down in size and reduced power consumption could be run off a 300-400 PSU with no issue. Small gaming gpu card with the 10X the performance of whats availlable now.




Volta will bring a new way of creating photo realistic graphics> what this means possibly is that now the card can render shades, objects and textures...take that data...store it in the ram where it now can be used by the gpu when it needs to recall those effects...the ram will be capable of storing 1TB of data it can access at any time...basically if you want to compare it to how games will work...take a vehicle as an object in an environment, in that environment requires hundreds of textures and shades to be rendred...the gpu can do this but not in real time...so all those shades and textures are now stored in the ram...and called upon moment by moment as the frames progress, thus creating a more realistic lighting effect that allows to gpu to do other functions. :rockout:

I agree cards will get smaller. A 6" card tomorrow will do what todays 10" card does. That doesn't mean 10" or 12" cards will stop being produced. There will always be larger sized cards because there will always be room for it, power for it, and demand for it. If they start stacking memory, the card will stay the same size but simply have more memory. It's like CPUs. As soon as they get faster, the OS gets bigger. Software will always keep hardware in check but continue to improve our experience overall. GPUs will still be $400, The OS will still be slow, average FPS will still be 30-60, but it'll look better.

Just remember, money controls advancements in technology, not human ability. We are capable of much more.
 
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Just remember, money controls advancements in technology, not human ability. We are capable of much more.


* I agree, Look at the Nazi's/ Germans? they developed technology that was decades away and in 10 years they developed technologies that would obscure todays pace of technology. Once you take wall street out of the equation, then pressing the Star-Trek button becomes much more easier and frequent.
 
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Quick update:

The injection molding is running behind but I had a chance to see the molds today. Not much to say other then it looks like my parts, inverted. :) Should have them this week.

In the mean time:

I'm fiddling around with ideas that take me back to my first plan to build THE smallest mini-ITX gaming system possible. I've always looked back since this project started and I cringe every time I have to add a millimeter here and a millimeter there. All I can say about this little guy is... It's under 3" tall, less then 12" wide, and less then 11" deep. About the size of an Xbox360 but thinner. It will have an internal 400w PSU without the need for an external power brick. The PSU fan is near silent under load. The idea is to be as minimalistic as possible. That means 2.5" drives only, no optical drive, and likely only one or two USBs up front for user interfaces. If you have to load a game or app via. CD or DVD you will need an external drive but once you fill it up it's very portable. If these systems ever come to be, they will be pre-built with a GPU included. Probably something along the lines of an AMD quad or an i3/i5/i7 with up to four GPU options. Two each (high-end/low-end) from NV and AMD (an HD7870 will fit in it). That's about all you'll be able to choose from.

Today's test was with a modified 300w AthenaPower FlexATX PSU. Other options include TFX PSUs. Load was a Q9550/HD5870/Valley benchmark. That's only about 250w from the wall but it gives me a good idea how well it'll hold up.

I used a FlexATX because there isn't a form factor that complies with my intentions so I'm making it. The FlexATX PSU's normally use a 40mm fan that's ridiculously loud under load and completely unacceptable. I'll only be using it's guts but placing it in a different enclosure that allows for a larger fan and much better airflow over the heatsinks.

Attached is a pic of me screwing around at work to see if a fan blowing down on the PSU was enough to keep the 40mm fan from spinning up. If the 40mm fan stays quiet, then it must be nice and cool. If the 40mm starts spinning up when the heatsinks hit, to pick a number, 60c, then if it stays quiet they must be below 60c. Take a look at how cramped it is. No wonder that little fan has to work so hard. There's hardly any room for airflow. With the 60mm at 2500rpm blowing down on it, the hottest component was the transformer at 50c and the 40mm didn't make a peep.

The whole point was to see if these types of PSU's (that have very small PCBs) were capable of powering a somewhat high-end gaming system IF they had more optimized cooling. I would say a 150w GPU and a 95w CPU makes a fairly capable gaming rig.

The Poptarts used for size reference were eaten after the test. :)

Image08202013005209 (Medium).jpg


Image08202013005220 (Medium).jpg
 
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de.das.dude

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take the guts out and put them on separately!
 
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take the guts out and put them on separately!

It becomes a safety issue. Quite often the heatsink on the primary side is live, as is the case with the 300w Athena Power Flex-ATX 1U supply above.

Using TFX internals is going to be the way to go. Take a look at this 300w InWin PSU. The upright heatsinks placed parallel with the airflow (altered fan placement) will likely offer better cooling then the 1U solutions. TFX supplies are available with 400~500w of claimed output.

MINIXPSU2 (Medium).jpg
 

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TFX supplies are available with 400~500w of claimed output.

Which, depending on OEM, model, and connected hardware, means 350-450W of good, stable power.
It also looks like(on that model, at least) the heatsink orientation is better for your purposes, and the footprint(case aside) is a bit smaller.
 
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If the system specs were something like a 660ti or 7850 we'd see ~150w 12.5a for a GPU. An i7 4770 (overkill for the application) is only 84w 7a. The only other thing in there is the board, ram, and two 2.5" drives. Say another 50w?. 284w total. Under normal use it's probably half that and a 300-400w would be plenty.

The HD5870 tested claims 188w 15.6a and I did run into an issue with the system rebooting when exiting a 3d application. When I plugged in my PCIe filter the problem went away. My guess is there's a spike that trips the PSU's current limiter. The Flex's 12v rails are only rated for 16a. I'm playing on the edge as it is.

This particular filter provides an additional 6000uf (6x 1000uf 105c) of filtering placed near the graphics card. It significantly reduces ripple at the card. The effects even show up on the 3.3 and 5v rails. In the case of that Flex ATX it prevented PSU shutdown due to OCP tripping. I'm sure everyone and their brother will start selling them after this post. lol

000_0252 (Medium).jpg
 
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SATA data cables and Y power cables are in. Arctic cooling F8 80mm non-pwm fan samples are also in. I really like this fan. Not too loud but it really moves some air considering it's only 2000rpm. The motor and fluid dynamic bearing are silent. Arctic Cooling calls the fan "Perfectly Quiet" but it's not. There's definitely some blade hum but that goes away when the speed is reduced. Since a speed controller is being provided, I'm going to go with this fan because of it's 31 CFM rating and it's 6 year warranty.

Four of these fans moving 31 CFM add up to 124 CFM. Chassis volume is 0.41 cubic feet. It's volume of air is moved 300 times a minute or 5 times a second. It will be less due to obstructions but they are impressive figures to look at.

As mentioned, the chassis will fit a 120mm radiator but uses two 80mm case fans to push air through it. These Arctic Cooling fans claim to have a high static pressure due to it's 9-blade impeller design. I would agree that the pressure is definitely higher then some of the other fans I've tested but I don't have the equipment to measure it. I'm anxious to see how they perform with a 120mm AIO WC loop.


* I thought most modern PSU's now have built in ripple features already.

They have caps in the output stage that help smooth power delivery but often they're rated using a resistive load which only reflects it's ability to smooth the ripples produced by the switching in the supply. If you watched the 12v rail on a scope and placed a 10a resistive load on it you would see noise at a fairly high frequency caused by the power supply. The PSU's tiny caps are fine for filtering that. Now use a GPU with a load that fluctuates (with frame rate) between 8a and 12a (10a average). Take a look at that on the scope. It's a mess! Even though the average load is still 10a, those 12v spikes can cause a PSU's current limiter to trip. That was exactly the case in my test.
 
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thats a nice psu u got there.
 
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With steam machines coming out soon I think a lot more cases of this type are going to start popping up on the market. (Examples ASrock A8 and Silverstone Raven). I was wondering 2 things
1) do you think you will make a no-optical option now that SteamOS is coming onto the market?
2)When do you think these things will be available?
 
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With steam machines coming out soon I think a lot more cases of this type are going to start popping up on the market. (Examples ASrock A8 and Silverstone Raven). I was wondering 2 things
1) do you think you will make a no-optical option now that SteamOS is coming onto the market?
2)When do you think these things will be available?

1 - There are variations of the chassis including a 'bare minimum' model consisting of ITX components, a 2.5" hdd/ssd, and add-on GPU, years before Steam "thought it up" ;)
2 - I don't have a release date yet but I'm working on a partnership with another company that may help get things moving faster then they are.
 

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May I suggest that you hit market as quickly as possible? There are already competitors releasing similar product with them gradually moving into your form factors making it more difficult for you to sell in the long run. On top of that, the steambox is seriously shaking up the market and you can see companies coming into this side of the market with similar form factors.

By selling a limited number of units at a higher margin to account for higher costs, you can put the profit back into ramping up production while simultaneously working out the minor bugs you wouldn't figure out yourself.
 

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Hey there Lazzer,

Been following this thread/case for awhile now. But very recently I decided to actually build a slimmer HTPC/gaming rig than what I currently have and this case is basically everything I've been wanting in small computer case: stylish HTPC look on the outside, enough space to fit a full sized GPU on the inside, ability to change the orientation, and a "large" PSU to run it all. So congratulations on that part.

However, I noticed that the last post was about a month ago and I just wanted to check in and make sure you were still developing this case. I have no doubt that it will generate good sales especially in today's market. With the introduction of steamOS and steam boxes many consumers are going to be looking to a case very similar to this. As far as the market goes, there are very many good mITX and mATX cases out there, but none that are slim and stylish, placing this case in a very specific setting.

Again, I just wanted to check in and see how production was going. Any idea when it is going to hit the market? And how were the reviews?

EDIT- Have you checked out the 1U server size PSU's? EVGA has a 500W 80+ Gold in their Hadron Air case
 
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Yes I'm still nibbling at it just much slower then expected. The two plastic parts (power switch retainer and power button) came in. 1000pcs of each. The power button doesn't have as tight a fit as I'd like so we're revising the die to place a lip on the back of the button to prevent any chance it could pop off. The devil truly is in the details.

Server power supplies are not quite. They don't have to be in a server environment. Unless EVGA had the PSU manufacturer address the issue, it will likely wind up with the same noise problem the Revolt has. Noise. During my testing, the average system load running synthetic benchmarks was 250~350w depending on the components. An i7 4770k @4ghz with an HD7870 sat around 300w. An 80% psu will use 375w worth to put out 300w. That's 75w of heat to get rid of which is just 10w less then a 4770k generates. It's not a huge amount of power but imagine cooling an i7 with a 40mm fan. I was aiming for silent to near silent operation even under heavy loads and I'm very happy with the results of the prototypes.

Sorry guys. Just hang in there. :)
 
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Creating an idea like this and bringing it to fruition is much easier said than done. I'm sure Lazzer has a regular 8 hour, 5 days a week job. This might just be a hobby for him at the moment. I just hope it's worth the wait because I for one have been planning on building a small form factor ITX system for my HDTV in the living room for quite some time, but I keep on waiting for cooler CPUs (14nm Broadwell) and GPUs (20nm AMD/Nvidia) so that it would be a perfect mix of power/tdp/temps. Make us proud Lazzer!! :toast:
 

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I'm just really looking forward to the release of this case :D
You do you Lazzer!
 
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I recently won a video card (an R9 280X), freeing up my Radeon HD 7870, so I've started looking into making my own slim PC. After a quick search, I found all of the retail cases to suck pretty bad. They're either small enough and don't fit a full size GPU, or fit a full size GPU and are too big for most entertainment centers. Glad to see someone doing it right (and like you said, way before "Steam Boxes").

Keep after it! Unfortunately I'm too cheap to buy one of your cases, but I still love what you're doing. My own design ended up being pretty similar, but is obviously not as polished as yours.

I'm making mine out of wood and calling it the "Bento Box". Japanese styled etching or woodburning.

I'm taking the guts out of PSU's I have laying around to and probably using a MicroATX board and a ribbon PCIE riser, and then just mounting all the parts to either half of the wooden box. Not slick, but it'll get me by.

I hope you get out into the market soon and kick some butt! You're the man!

PS. Things I've learned in this exercise, which I'm sure are old hat for you:
  1. Standardized parts make this really tough. They have essentially set the shape of computers into tall, wide, boxes if you want anything with a dedicated GPU.
  2. AMD processors use too much power for these little boxes.
  3. There's a pretty big variation in component placement on motherboards. I've tried mocking up an intake port for the CPU (if you've ever looked inside DELL workstation boxes, you'll get the idea), but I pretty much have to wait until I decide on a board before placing it.
  4. A 3.5" drive is NOT 3.5" wide; it's 4" :)
  5. These boxes could be a lot smaller if the power connection for the GPU wasn't on the top of the card.
 
Joined
Jan 6, 2007
Messages
2,555 (0.41/day)
Location
Illinois
Processor i7 2600k@4.6ghz
Motherboard MSI z68ma-ed55
Cooling Silentx Extreem 120mm
Memory 2x4gb XMS 7-8-7-20 1600
Video Card(s) HD6870
Storage 2x128gb Kingston Hyper-X (Raid0), 2x750gb RE3 (RAID1), 2x750gb RE3 (RAID1)
Display(s) Soyo 24", Gateway 22"
Case Fractal Design Arc Mini 6x120mm fans.
Audio Device(s) Onboard
Power Supply Zalman 750w
Software Windows 7
Creating an idea like this and bringing it to fruition is much easier said than done. I'm sure Lazzer has a regular 8 hour, 5 days a week job. This might just be a hobby for him at the moment. I just hope it's worth the wait because I for one have been planning on building a small form factor ITX system for my HDTV in the living room for quite some time, but I keep on waiting for cooler CPUs (14nm Broadwell) and GPUs (20nm AMD/Nvidia) so that it would be a perfect mix of power/tdp/temps. Make us proud Lazzer!! :toast:

About 84hrs a week. 6 days from 12pm to 2am. Oh the joys of owning a gaming arena. I only have a few hours for myself in the morning and whatever time I can sneak in during slow days. Nose to the grindstone is an understatement.

There hasn't been much to update mainly due to the design being finalized. I doubt you guys want to hear about how long it takes shipping my SATA cable orders from China. :)

But there is some news. A good friend in manufacturing (who's already made a couple 1000 parts for this chassis already) is teaming up to help push this to market as soon as possible. We are hoping to start pre-sales soon and get this on Tiger's shelves ASAP.

The first run of power supplies will most likely be Delta-built Antec units that will be modified in-house. The PSU warranty will be handled by us and PSU replacements will also be available for OOW (out of warranty) service. General parts will be available as well should you scratch your faceplate, strip a thread, etc.. We want you to enjoy the chassis for as long as ITX is a standard.

On another note... Has anyone noticed the Steam box uses a C6 "micky-mouse" inlet connector for AC power? I first looked at using the C6 because they're smaller (then the standard C14 PC power connector) but when I found the C6 only had a 2.5a rating, I abandoned the option. In other words, the C6 is only rated to 300w. The think the Steam box PSU is 450w. I wonder how they received electrical certification.

I'm taking the guts out of PSU's I have laying around

Do be careful. Some supplies have a live heatsink. Use an IR to measure temp. Do not touch it!
 
Joined
Feb 5, 2014
Messages
14 (0.00/day)
Processor i5-3570k, stock clock
Motherboard ASRock Z77 Extreme4
Cooling Stock Intel CPU Cooler, 1 Front 120mm intake fan, 1 Rear 120mm exhaust fan
Memory 2x8 GB Corsair Vengeance
Video Card(s) Diamond R9 280X
Storage 120GB Samsung 840 , Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache
Display(s) Dell E2414H
Case Antec Solution SLK3700-BQE
Audio Device(s) On Board
Power Supply Corsair TX650
Do be careful. Some supplies have a live heatsink. Use an IR to measure temp. Do not touch it!

Thanks Lazzer. I don't plan on getting too hands on with it running, but I hadn't thought about the sinks being live. I'll check them for wiring and with a multimeter and see if I can't dig up an IR sensor for temp.

And with my box being wood, I wouldn't want to start any fires! Maybe I should call this the Tinderbox instead!

Can't wait to see your finished product and a big payoff for you!
 

BrandonFrisby

New Member
Joined
Feb 20, 2014
Messages
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If you're looking for any help with marketing, PR, or even just an interested investor, please feel free to contact me.
I love the concept behind what you're doing and I definitely think you've got a solid eye for quality and aesthetics - both key elements to really make a successful business with satisfied customers and a great bottom line. I'd love to help in any way possible to see that to reality.
Keep up the great work!
- Brandon
 
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