While we’re all stuck at home it’s a great time for some gaming, unfortunately my girlfriend's
old PC has been struggling lately in newer games, so in this video we’re going to build
a Mini ITX system that should perform much better going into 2020 and beyond!
I actually did a video on the PC we’re upgrading from about 3 years ago. It’s got an Intel
6700K, Nvidia GTX 1060 3gb, 16gb of memory and a 512gb NVMe M.2 SSD. I picked a decent
CPU at the time with the idea of just upgrading the GPU some time in the future, and although
the GPU is the current limitation there with modern games rather than just upgrading that
we’re going down the new build path.
Here’s the hardware I’ll be using for this new system. I’ve had the NZXT H210i
for a while now and according to my girlfriend, small case equals cute, so we’re going with
that. It’s a Mini ITX case, so the rest of the hardware has been selected with this
in mind and of course this one has an RGB light strip along the top which can be customized
through the NZXT cam software, along with other things like fan speeds.
I wanted to go with Ryzen 3000 as they offer good performance per dollar at the moment,
and ended up using the 3600X with stock cooler. Now hear me out, I think the 3600X is a bad
choice when you can get the 3600 for less money, I don’t suggest buying a 3600X unless
the price is very close to the 3600, however I had both from my 3600 vs 3600X comparison,
and considering I probably won’t need the 3600X for future content, I’ve sacrificed
it to this build. Another reason to go with this platform is the AM4 socket, we could
upgrade to a 16 core 3950X in future when it’s cheaper, of course with a cooler upgrade,
or potentially even next gen Ryzen.
With the processor selected, I asked Asrock to see what Ryzen Mini ITX motherboards they
had available. This build has been a long time coming, so I got the Fatality X470 Gaming
ITX board just around the time the X570 versions came out, but that’s fine, the benefits
like PCIe 4.0 aren’t needed here. The only issue was that I had to use an older processor
to upgrade the BIOS so that the board would be ready for the 3600X, the X570 on the other
hand would have been good to go out of the box. The only thing I didn’t consider is
that the H210i case has a USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-C port on the front I/O, but this board doesn’t
support the connector. It’s not a big deal here though, we don’t currently have any
Type-C peripherals and there’s Type-C on the back of the motherboard if needed in a
pinch.
For the rest of the I/O we’ve got two USB 2 Type-A ports with PS/2 port, I don’t think
we’ll ever use those, DisplayPort and HDMI port, again we won’t be using those as I’ve
got discrete graphics rather than an APU, USB 3.1 Gen2 Type-A and C port, two USB 3.1
Gen1 Type-A ports, gigabit ethernet, audio ports, and WiFi 5 and Bluetooth 5 support
once we attach the included antenna.
There’s a single NVMe M.2 slot on the back of the board, and I’ve populated this with
the MP33 from Team group, which is a 1TB NVMe SSD with good read and write speeds. This
will be a nice upgrade over the slower 512gb drive in the old system as games continue
to get larger. With this case it’s also possible to access it from the back if you
remove the two 2.5” drive mounts that cover it.
For the graphics Gigabyte sent over their GeForce RTX 2060 Mini ITX OC. Now I do actually
have sufficient space in the H210i for a regular size GPU, however I wasn’t sure if I’d
be going with an all in one liquid cooler at the front of the case which would reduce
the space, so figured as I can get essentially all the performance in a smaller size that
I might as well. This thing is tiny for the power it’s packing, at just 17cm in length
it’s only got one fan, is powered by one 8-pin power connector, and has one HDMI 2.0b
output and three DisplayPort 1.4 outputs. Despite being smaller, it’s still got an
ever so slight overclock over reference and still runs cool enough under load. My girlfriend
streams on Twitch, so the upgrade to the NVENC encoder should also be good.
I had to route the front panel audio cable above the single PCIe slot, as there was no
space to get it under the 2060, which I guess is just a limitation of the smaller Mini ITX
board.
As our Mini ITX motherboard just has two memory slots, I’ve gone with 32gb of T-Force Night
Hawk memory from Teamgroup. It runs at DDR4-3200 CL16 out of the box which should go alright
with our Ryzen platform, and it’s of course got the all important RGB lighting which will
obviously give us nice performance gains, and the effects can be modified through software.
All of this is powered by the Corsair RM650, it’s a modular 650 watt 80 plus gold power
supply, but the most important part is that it fits into the H210i case. There’s actually
quite a lot of clearance space inside, the power supply is 16cm long but we’ve got
room for 31cm, so I’m just using that as cable space. The case has a removable dust
filter underneath, so I’ve installed the power supply with the fan facing down. I went
with Corsair as I’ve used their power supplies in all my systems for the last 10 years without
any issues.
Overall I think the build turned out well, with some caveats. There’s heaps of space
free at the front as I didn’t end up going with an AIO cooler, rather than deal with
the possibility of things like pump failures or leaks in future I’ve just stuck to the
stock cooler that came with the 3600X as I’ve found that to be sufficient in my own testing.
The H210i doesn’t come with any front intake fans, but has the rear and top exhausts, so
I could either move those to the front or get some extras. It’s a little empty, but
I guess it beats parts not fitting, and again smaller equals cute so I guess it’s super
cute.
Not being able to use the front Type-C port was a bit of oversight on my part when picking
out the motherboard, but not a deal breaker. The upgrade process to get the X470 board
was a bit annoying, but went smoothly enough, if you don’t have an older Ryzen CPU spare
I’d suggest looking at a newer model with Ryzen 3000 support out of the box. I think
they have an upgrade program where they will send you an old chip to upgrade with, but
again it’s more work. The WiFi antenna cables are a bit messy, it would have been nice if
they were just antenna sticks on the back.
With this hardware it should be capable of just about any game thrown at it, especially
given it’s only hooked up to 1080p monitors. I’d consider the system to be above mid
range with decent upgrade paths available in terms of processor and graphics. Today
though, all modern games run great with good settings and it’s a nice upgrade coming
from that 1060 3gb system with half the ram, half the storage and fewer CPU cores, all
while in a much more compact case.
This was my first Mini ITX build and I think it turned out pretty good, maybe next time
I’ll get some ideas from mr Optimum Tech and go even smaller. I’m definitely a little
sick of my current system taking up a bunch of desk space in any case. Anyway let me know
what you thought of the build, or everything I’ve done wrong down in the comments, and
if you’re new to the channel don’t forget to subscribe for future tech videos like this
one. Ok well maybe not exactly like this one, PC builds are pretty rare on the channel as
I mainly focus on laptop stuff, but I do have an interest in this, so also let me know if
it’s something you’d want to see more of or if I should just stick to laptops.