Project Mashiro: mITX Gaming Build Log

So a few weeks back I was pondering about what I'll replace my current desktop with since that's going to be handed off to a family member. Got a lot of good suggestions and after thinking about it more on my own, I've finally gotten around to gathering the parts and assembling this new rig. I'll break the build log into four sections: trip and purchases, assembly, benchmarks (stock), and benchmarks (OC).

Trip and Purchases:

I ended up making three separate purchases, and will possibly make a fourth tomorrow afternoon. The power supply was bought from Newegg a few weeks back, the case was bought on Amazon two days ago, and the remaining parts were purchased at the closest Microcenter near me in Duluth, GA. I say near, but in reality it's around 130 miles (209 km) one way, so most of today was spent driving instead of building.

Part list:

Spoiler

Case: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B015UDUAKG/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
PSU: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151095
CPU: http://www.microcenter.com/product/451885/Core_i5-6600K_SkyLake_35GHz_1151_Boxed_Processor
GPU: http://www.microcenter.com/product/467997/GeForce_GTX_1060_Overclocked_Dual-Fan_6GB_GDDR5_Video_Card
RAM: http://www.microcenter.com/product/464706/16GB_8GB_x_2_DDR4-2400_PC4-19200_Desktop_Memory_Kit
SSD: http://www.microcenter.com/product/468435/600p_Series_256GB_NVMe_M2_Internal_SSD
Motherboard: http://www.microcenter.com/product/456225/Z170I_Pro_Gaming_LGA_1151_mini-ITX_Intel_Motherboard
CPU Cooler: http://www.microcenter.com/product/404942/Hydro_Series_H60_High_Performance_Liquid_CPU_Cooler
OS: http://www.microcenter.com/product/452013/Windows_10_Home_64-bit_OEM_DVD_-_English

Plus other things, like a replacement fan for my old desktop, as well as a bit of a surprise for this build...

I've been to the Atlanta area three times now, and the third time definitely wasn't the charm. Still think it's not all that great, and I'd rather be in Charlotte. But the nicer city doesn't have a Microcenter, and I wanted to see what the hype was with that store. At any rate, it's nice to have a road trip every so often, even if it's to an area you don't particularly care for.

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The trip there was uneventful, just a boring Interstate drive. Though I did have some lunch before walking into the store (food was very much " just okay"):

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Store itself was nice, and it was weird but really cool to see what is basically a physical Newegg relatively close to me. There was a TigerDirect store even closer to the GA/SC border, but one of the MC salesmen told me that TigerDirect has shut down. Huh... news to me I suppose. At any rate, I made some salesman a healthy commission and while I was there, Amazon told me that my case had arrived back home. Chucked the parts in the trunk and made my way back to the border.

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While the trip to Duluth was boring, the drive back certainly wasn't. Not too far away from the city, a car carrier's payload had caught on fire and was burning real nicely, along with most of I-85 and the surrounding woods for about a mile or so.

Spoiler

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So, on the highway paved with blood(1) and flanked by fire, I made it back home only to notice that I had received two packages. I only expected the case, and that certainly had arrived. The other was this big box from Amazon which I had no clue what it was supposed to be. Turns out that people who activate Prime trials get a free gift from the company as a sort of welcome thing. However, I have no idea what prompted them to send me this:

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Why Amazon thought I could use a ~4ft (1.2m) tall Pilsner "vase" is beyond me.

Anyway, here are all the parts for what I'm calling Mashiro:

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(1): There were also an abnormal amount of dead/exploded deer on the highway. Several bodies, and quite a lot of smeared blood on the road at various points.

 

Assembly:

This took whatever was left of my Saturday to accomplish. Total time was something like 4-5 hours to complete, due to a combination of piecing things together, reading manuals, cable management, an important college football game, and me being an overall slow person when it comes to assemblies.

First thing out of its box (aside from the PSU, which was used for testing an issue in the older desktop) was the case. While I'd used a CoolerMaster Elite 100 for my home server and was considering the Thermaltake Suppressor F1, I ended up going for the Thermaltake Core V1, in particular the Snow Edition. Originally I wasn't planning on making this a themed build, but when I was coming up with a name for this build, it sort of made sense. For the past few years I had used an Ace Combat naming scheme for my computers and other devices (Strigon, Aquilia, Garuda, Ofnir, Mobius, Blaze, EagleEye, SkyEye, etc.), but it was getting a bit boring for me and I was running out of good squadron names to use. Now I think I'll use favorite characters for my next few builds, starting at this build. White on red seems like an interesting (and fitting) combination.

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Loving how Thermaltake designed this thing. After building out the home server in the Elite 100 (which isn't a bad case, mind you), I appreciated the extra room this thing provides; this was extremely useful when I was doing cable management throughout the build.

Next up was the motherboard, an Asus Z170I Pro Gaming board. Ended up choosing this board due to CPU choice, audio out options, built-in WiFi, and the shear amount of I/O in the back. Packaging was pretty nice, with the only "downside" was that I couldn't use the included gift (I'm already a pretty decent World of Warships player who's been on since open beta). The I/O shield has foam padding, which I thought was weird but whatever.

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It came with this plastic CPU carrier which, from what I read is supposed to ensure that absolutely anyone can correctly install the CPU. Personally, I found it to be annoying since it was required to be used (at least judging by how the CPU locking mechanism looks) and the only way I found how to secure the CPU in there was to put my finger on the bottom and push in so that the other side clicked in (didn't harm the CPU, but I think that's a stupid idea to make a user do that).

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Once the CPU was in place on the board, I took out the RAM and installed that next.

It's RAM, what do you want me to say about it? It stores stuff for a short time and it has a red heatsink, going along with the theme. Got myself 16GB of it, same as in my old build, so the only difference is a speed increase I won't notice in my work flow (DDR3-1333 vs DDR4-2400).

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While normally I'd put on the CPU cooler next, I'm doing things a bit differently since I'm using an AIO liquid cooler for this build. I'll leave that off until the board is installed in the case. I did install the bracket under the motherboard before that went into the case, however.

In the meantime, I cracked open the Intel 600p's box and wow... I knew M.2 drives were small, but I never realized just how tiny these things were.

Well, I should have since the dimensions are obvious (2280: 22mm wide, 80mm long), but due to being an American I don't have the skills to mentally picture things in metric .

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As previously mentioned, I needed to put on the CPU cooler's underside bracket before installing the motherboard into the case.

On a side note, there's a reasons why I pretty much never do unboxings:

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Corsair, I honestly had no idea how to open your H60 box. Just ended up ripping the whole thing apart.

Anyway, the worst part about this build from a planing perspective was the CPU cooler. Before making the trip to Georgia, I spent a lot of time researching coolers, primarily air coolers since that's what I'm familiar with and feel safe using. The Core V1 has a vertical height limit of 140mm, and after taking measurements with the motherboard/CPU installed, 140mm is very much a hard limit. My previous desktop used a CoolerMaster TX3 (the build was originally in a smaller mid-tower case than what it's currently in), and if I was building in a case big enough, I would have just bought some flavor of CoolerMaster's 212 series of coolers and call it a day.

I had to rule out most, if not all, of the tower-style air coolers I found since they were taller than 140mm. The low-profile air coolers I found were generally lackluster for anything other than stock CPU settings and did not perform too well with overclocked CPUs. Since I was absolutely going for the i5-6600K for this build, that'd defeat the whole purpose; if I wanted stock heatsink performance, I'd just bought an i5-6600 and used the Intel cooler (which actually aren't too bad for lower-powered CPUs; it's what I use in the home server, which has even less head room for heatsinks).

Finally gave in to liquid cooling and ended up going for the Corsair H60 since that was small enough to fit into the case. Looks and feels like a quality product, though I think I'll still be a bit paranoid about it and leaking and will keep an eye on it for the next few days as I set up software and run benchmarks.

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Progress so far: Motherboard is installed in the case, currently leaving the case's 200mm intake fan in place. Was planning on attaching the radiator/fan combo within the case. Have yet to plug in any of the case cables to the motherboard, including the USB 3.0 cable (more on that later...).

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At this point I discovered that one of the chips on the motherboard is actually socketed(!). Looking back into the manual, this chip is somehow related to the on-board audio circuitry. Seeing socketed ICs like this remind me of the computer engineering labs I used to take freshman year of college (before doing badly and realizing that software is better than hardware anyway ).

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Took off the 200mm intake fan in order to install the radiator and its 120mm fan. First installed both the radiator and fan on the inside of the case, but found out that configuration would cause more bending in the tubes than I'm comfortable with. So those was unscrewed and I moved the 120mm fan to where the 200mm fan used to be, keeping the radiator on the inside of the case. Still, it was a tight fit and the tubes now hang slightly outside of the top of the case.

At this point, this is the first time I'm plugged in the USB 3.0 header.

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At this point, this is the second attempt at cable-managing the USB 3.0 header. Why do these cables need to be so stiff? Whatever happened to the design philosophy found in the USB 2.0 of old? Or, you know, most of the other cables within a case, which are very flexible and easy to move around?

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Next up is the GPU, which is another piece of hardware I spent too much time being indecisive about. Was leaning towards the RX 480 8GB, and in particular the XFX RX 480 with the replaceable fans. However, once my last-minute "let's make a themed build!" came up, I ultimately went with the GTX 1060 6GB, and in particular this Asus model.

This GPU also comes with a World of Warships code which I can't use. Thinking about giving them away to two people in the NBR community who would be interested.

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Was happy to see that Asus was so kind as to include AGP support for their take on the 1060. Shame on Newegg, Microcenter, et. al. for not pointing out this feature in their reviews!

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More points to Asus for redesigning the latch on the PCIe slot:

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Things are starting to look very nice in this case. Note that this is the third time I've had to disconnect and reconnect the USB 3.0. Each time I do this, the more I hate the stiff cable design.

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Now for "unboxing" the PSU (in quotes since I'd already used it briefly a few weeks ago). Excellent packaging by Seasonic and while 620 watts is a bit overkill for this build, it' fully modular, was on sale on Newegg at the time of purchase, and gives me a comfortable amount of overhead once I Start overclocking the CPU and GPU.

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Clemson v FSU football game comes on in the middle of this build. Fun game to watch and we end up winning, but it contributed quite a bit to the delay in getting this build log out.

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The only thing I can really complain about with the Core V1 is that the Thermaltake logo on the front is too large and "in your face" with the advertising in my opinion. Luckily, my family keeps a spare hair dryer in my apartment for when they come to visit.

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At this point, the only thing I'd need to add to the build would be one of the 1TB HDDs in my old desktop. However, I need to copy the data off of those and I don't strictly need it installed right away, so for right now the only drive in the new desktop is the SSD.

My fears about the CPU cooler tubes not fitting as well as I liked turned out to be true. Had to force the top panel back into place a bit by pushing down on the tubing. However, it's a relatively minor issue it seems, since it didn't take that much force to fit inside the case dimensions.

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So... did I break anything during the build process? Thankfully no; the system is able to POST just fine!

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This whole time, I was using the Core V1 box as a trash can. Only helped a little bit since the table was still absolutely littered with bits and pieces of computer hardware. Anyway, since I had to have my old desktop opened up for replacing the rear case fan, I went ahead and borrowed its DVD drive in order to install Windows 10 Home.

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And the project is a success (so far)!

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Anywho, it's nearly 4am local time, so.....

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Sorry for the late posting. Things got quite busy at work and I haven't had much time to goof off and run benchmarks until this weekend.

The first benchmarks I ran were for the SSD, since I was mostly interested in the I/O performance and wanted to see how it compared to my old Intel 320 (barely better than a HDD to be honest). So far, I'm loving the improved performance using the 600p, and it'll help me quite a bit for some of my tasks (KSP loading, VM drives, etc.). Still a bit short of what the specs say, though it might be due to whatever test data the benchmarks use. I'll have to look into this once I have the time and will update this post later.













FireStrike benchmarks. Not really familiar with this benchmark honestly, so I don't know if these are good or bad numbers to have for a stock GTX 1060 6GB and a stock i5-6600K.



TimeSpy. Again, no context as to what these scores mean. But here you go anyway, and they can be useful once I get around to overclocking.

 

Reserved: Benchmarks (OC)

 

Nice! My first trip to MicroCenter was when I was building my PC and needed to get new memory - While I was there for only 15-20 minutes (and drove about 45 min into MD to get there!) I felt like a kid in a candy store and definitely have to get back at some point....

It's a awesome place, glad you got to check one out. Looking forward to more updates!

 

It definitely was a kid in (expensive) candy store feeling. And actually, the sales people weren't too bad (compared to, say, Best Buy). The only downside is that it's quite a drive for me and for most of my hardware purchases, I don't see much sense in making the trip when Amazon/Newegg is generally cheaper, factoring in gas (round trip was something like 3/4 tank for me) and taxes (paid about $50-$60 just in tax!).

Still, it was very enjoyable and I made sure to browse the entire store before leaving.

 

For reference, TigerDirect did not go out of business. They just shuttered their stores. The website is still running strong.

Very nice build so far. The fact that such a new graphics card still supports AGP raises me eyebrows. But only one PCIe port? No SLI for you then!

As for your larger than necessary cooling tubes. You may be able to shorten them. I have not dealt with liquid cooling in PCs yet so I don't know if these closed systems are high pressure/volume, or how the hoses connect and secure in place. I would imagine if they were just simple rubber hoses with nylon thread cores, you could conceivably cut them down to the size you want them if you could take the hose end off and reinstall on the cut end. But that's just me...

 

Nice write up.
And you couldn't go without adding any animu images, could you

On build itself, not sure I would go with H60. Then again you have a small build, so there is not much else out there. The preferred option, Kraken x41, is unfortunately more expensive than H60, but obviously has a better performance.

 

I'm happy you're happy!

 

Haha tell me about it... Felt like buying half the store... Still look back and wish I had the money to buy something from there.. Was pretty bankrupt back then/no job etc.. Now that I do have one, next time I go to the states will buy components from there to build my new PC lol

Happy for you, enjoy your new system

Also what is the screen you have been using with it? Seems very compact!

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

Needs a baumkuchen case badge.

 

I'm loving all the pictures, great thread!

 

Like herpes and LED lighting in computers, it's the gift that keeps on giving . Also, it's much harder to make reaction pictures from aircraft; for example, I just now woke up.

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Oh, by the way, I completely forgot to take a picture of the project's surprise. I ended up getting some lighting for it:

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It's my old college TV, a Vizio E220VA. Currently using it since it's a spare screen I have, it has the correct ports, and I have the new desktop set up in my dining room.

Will be heading out to the store today to see if I can get a converter so I can plug in DisplayPort/HDMI into DVI/VGA. That, or I might end up just buying a new monitor. Given the bill so far, that'd be a drop in the bucket I suppose. And maybe I could set up a dual monitor setup somehow ...

More pictures to come!

 

I have a handful of DisplayPort to DVI adapters as well as a few DVI to HDMI adapters. If you're thinking of doing what I think you're thinking of doing, I can send a couple down your way for shipping.

 

I need to concert the VGA port on my server so I can plug into HDMI or Displayport in my monitor.. Probably not worth me paying shipping from the States to UK but if you could provide some info about the ones you use I could try getting one here..

Sent from my LG-H850 using Tapatalk

 

The DisplayPort to DVI adapters that I have are all about the same. Two are made by BizLink and the other is HP branded. All three are like this:

 

haven't seen you in a while

nice to see that you're actually coming back to the performance segment haha

 

You should check out OT section more

 

I'll do that.

 

Updated with some (stock) benchmarks. More (stock) benchmarks to come, along with comparisons with the stock and OC versions of my old desktop.

 

Thanks for the very detailed build log! also want to point out that corsair recommends that the rad's are mounted hose's down. I've seen other forums that users complained they got air lock/noise coming from the pump and had to switch there orientation. I'm sure that's rare though.

EDIT

Seems there is a small amount of air in there to account for expansion.

The manual says this in the FAQ


4. Do I mount the radiator hose up or down?


For optimized cooling, Corsair recommends the radiator is mounted hose down.

I'm sure you could turn it sideways with the outlet from the rad on the bottom and it would be good but I'd have to look into which side that is. Might help with the hoses hitting the top of the case as well. IDK something to look into, like I said it might be fine unless you move your case around and some air works its way into the pump. There seems to be a lot of conflicting reports on this after doing some googling.

 

Hmm, well so far I haven't encountered any noise or cooling issue from the current arrangement.

 

I'm sure you wont have any issues but if you do its something to think about. I really like your build and makes me want to get after the mITX build I've been pondering. Thanks again for the EXTREMELY detailed build log!!!

 

No problem! I've been putting off the overclocking and whatnot due to work, but I'm taking next week off so I should have more free time.

 

So for whatever reason, my old desktop refuses to run 3DMark's Firestrike, and of course it won't run TimeSpy (no DX12). So I guess I won't have those benchmarks to compare to.

Once I travel back to my family's house this weekend and get set up, I'll begin overclocking Mashiro and posting those benchmarks sometime during next week.