flylow

This case is quite small, almost a cube, and can only hold a micro-ATX board, the CPU cooler must not be higher than 12 cm and if your graphics card is exceeding the slot width by more than like half an inch it won't fit.

I bought the Gigabyte micro-ATX main board purely for availability. Initially I wanted to go for an MSI, but seriously to me it doesn't matter much.

At the time the best bang for the buck its thermal design power of 95 W is quite moderate and can be easily handled by almost any cooler. I don't overclock since for like 10 % more speed you burn an aweful lot more energy that needs to be handled.

Low profile, or won't fit. The buggers only report 1333 MHz capability so I had to force them to the advertised 1600 MHz. They are blue.

I got this nice graphics card from my brother, mainly for bitcoin mining and playing BF3. It's vastly overengineered for the price, though AMD learned and made the successors inferior again. The awesomest feature for me though is that it's not so wide so it fits my case.

In such a crammed case cable management proved essential. Again space was an issue but using Chinese Children Fingers™ I somehow managed.

eeeeeeew blazing fast this thing, and they gave it away almost for free at some time so I got me one. It holds the OSes and user settings. And BF3.

When I started I hooked them up to a RAID 1, however this turned into a nightmare since I don't have a hardware RAID controller, so it was slow and a pain to set up. Nowadays one of them is for Windows games, the other for all other bulk data.

On the CPU I put an Alpenföhn Panorama for its low profile. It came with a 10 cm fan that I immediately replaced by a 12 cm one. The case fans are two 12 cm fans in the front, and an 8 cm fan in the back. The power supply has to help evacuate the warm air. I know this reduces the unit's MTBF yet that's what I have to do if I don't want to run at a case temperature of above 50°C…

• Logitech G9x
• Cheery G230
• Razer Nostromo