Words are funny.
I’d tell you I’m doing something I need to do.
But I don’t need to. There is No Necessity in the action.
It isn’t even very well advised at all. I don’t mind mentioning I don’t have a ton of money and specifically I don’t have as much as I should. I’m hoping when I finally get the listings up for the bulk of the basement contents that I can make up some of the deficit.
Speaking of all of the stuff in the basement, it makes this project even less reasonable.
But it’s that need to do a thing. Whereas it was once a simple ‘want’, now has butted against logic and reason for much too long and has persisted, now having just simply become this ‘monkey on the back’ – a point of interest but really just a nagging thought that will not pass.
Insert your favorite Gandalf image macro.
I am still fighting Amazon to get the 9900K refunded. Something happened in shipping. They’ve promised me the refund in good faith, but that’s been twice now and it still hasn’t actually been credited.
Of all of the things to go missing in transit…
In any event, it still wasn’t the way to go, if for any reason it just didn’t ‘spark joy’. Or at least it didn’t versus the cost.
The new project sparked the tiniest amount of joy – the finding of the specific case (and power supply included) at a bargain price. Sucker for a deal.
As seen on the YouTube channel for ETA Prime several times in the recent months as of the time of this writing, there is a desirable mini-ITX format case that goes by the Inwin Chopin and its elusive evolution the Inwin Chopin Pro. These cases have the distinction of being in a minority which are extremely small format, ITX only cases with built in power supplies (none of the external bricks you may know I do so hate). They roll in significantly smaller than many solutions do due to not accommodating standard ATX units or even SFX power supplies – the Chopin uses either a proprietary format or a flexATX power supply, I do not know which. But it is small, delightfully so, and while it cannot accept a graphics card of any kind, and does allow more than a fair amount of space for not one but two 2.5″ hard disk or SSD devices, it is still just such an attractive, understated piece in my opinion.
Just a little pricey for my interests.
Unless you find one 40% off, open box, at your local brick and mortar style retailer. I happened upon it by chance, and went to the store to find it actually perfectly acceptably intact.
So now I own one, and it’s one of the vanishingly small number of purchases I do not instantly regret, EVEN THOUGH it’s costing me money beyond its own price.
When the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G hit retail, I had to have one of those too. There was no rationale. I had no need for one. But 8 Zen 3 cores (16 threads) in a 65 watt TDP (I know TDP means virtually nothing any more but still) with integrated Vega 8 graphics (no great shakes but impressive for an on-die solution within that 65 watt envelope) it’s like, the tippy top of a market considered to be “lower end”.
And it’s been sitting here since launch, a waste of somewhere between 3 and 400 dollars.
Where it really belongs is in a tiny, dense build like ETA Prime keeps doing over and over, right in a tiny chassis like the Inwin Chopin.
I don’t know where I’m going to put this thing. Maybe in my room. I don’t need this much power at what is more or less a terminal in my room, accessing either a VM or my primary desktop in the Living Room. But I could have it. And it comes with a power savings over my current terminal – Marlon – nebulous as the value of 20-ish watts of power would be.
But when it comes down to it, I’ve always wanted to do a Mini-ITX build. It’s always been a luxury thing. Mini-ITX always comes at a cost premium, and doesn’t even depreciate with time properly because all of the parts are so pricey at launch. They do less. They cost more. They’re dumb. MicroATX is phenomenally better for value and capability.
Yet.
Tiny computers are so cool.
I wish I had a stack of the “Tiny” form factor PCs like the Lenovo Tiny in the Living Room “Home Theater”. I have nothing to do with them. But I still want them.
And this is going to largely fill that gap in my irrational wants, I believe. It’s the aforementioned 8 core/16 thread/8 GPU core mini-beast that promises to be cool, nearly silent, and only take up about as much space as a Clancy novel. And no Power Brick!
Against better judgement, the lowest cost AM4 ITX board is in the mail, as is the low profile cooler it turns out I need. A shame the Wraith Stealth pack-in is too tall, but the low profile piece will also be even quieter, which I will appreciate.
Marlon is actually fairly quiet too, given it’s large, flower style all copper cooler. But it is a full ATX build, and it really does not disappear into the desk set up. Too bad to this day just about the smallest full ATX supporting case I’ve found is the Cooler Master Elite 360. Pro: fits full height cards. Con: wide enough to fit full height cards. I could weasel my low end, yesteryear GPU into a half height configuration it turns out. Thus, I wish I were. But cases just aren’t even out there for me. Maybe a 2U, but those aren’t a reasonable price just to do a transplant either.
The point is, I’m finally doing an ITX build. I came close a few months ago but thought better of it at the time. Now I’m already different enough compared to then: I care less, I’m more tired all the time, and I just wanna do something that’s even the slightest bit fun.
Currently, the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G Mini-ITX build will be placing that CPU into a low end ASRock B550M-ITX/AC board, which I think is different from the one I bought and returned a few months ago but I just don’t remember any more. (But then I went back and looked it up and it was the closely related ASRock B550 Phantom Gaming. Plus one additional m.2 slot which would have been really cool but not really worth the extra 50-90 dollars, at least not to me and not right now.) It will use the 16 GB (2×8 GB) DDR4-3600 kit I bought on a sale and have never even opened. The system including the GPU will get a negligible boost with the quicker RAM but I won’t be gaming on the machine so it barely matters. And at the moment it has one of the inconveniently small m.2 2230 nvme drives I got on quite the lark of an eBay binge. The system is named Eleven, since it’s running the Windows 11 Beta, although it may have updated itself to the full release I’m still unclear on the versioning.
I was thinking just earlier. Cable management, even of this tiny beast, is so much of the time to build nowadays. With single drive solutions and m.2 SSDs being fairly standard for performance builds now, all there really is to do is install CPU, or APU for an even easier time, attach cooling solution, install the m.2 drive, and then fit it into the case and cable manage. Not much to do from beginning to end.