Mjolnir

2023-01-25 05:12:59

Mjolnir

January 24, 2023

Mjolnir

As a lot as I liked the beautiful machine, the passive cooling and kind issue of the DB4 chassis had limitations. The very best GPU I may slot in (and funky down), a 1050 Ti, barely managed to run Diablo 2 Resurrected. Taking part in may turn out to be disagreeable at 30fps in busy ranges!

Regardless of its inadequacy as a gaming machine, I didn’t have the guts to scavenge the Streacom’s DB4 for elements. It’s too attractive and has served us too nicely. As an alternative I constructed a brand new machine primarily based on essentially the most lovely Small Kind Issue I may discover, Thor Zone’s Mjolnir.

Choosing parts

Listing of parts:

CPU : Intel Core i5-11600
RAM : Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GiB DDR4 3600Mhz
Motherboard : Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4
Storage : Samsung 980 Professional 2TiB M.2 NVMe
GPU : Nvidia 3060 Ti Founders Version
Chassis : Mjolnir by Thor Zone
CPU AIO : CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML120L
PSU : Corsair SF Sequence, SF750

As it will later prove, a Noctua NF-A14 doesn’t slot in a Mjolnir. Fortunately, the thermal benchmarks confirmed this construct doesn’t want an additional fan. In the event you insist on including one (for a core i9 possibly?), a NF-A12 ought to do.

Constructing it

The chassis comes pre-assembled. All it’s a must to do is slide out the core skeleton. Mounting every part is simple as a result of no panels are in the way in which. As soon as finished, the core slides again into the chassis.

Motherboard and PST mounted. Subsequent is the GPU on the opposite aspect due to a supplied Riser 4.0 cable.

I’m not going to lie, it’s a tight match on the CPU aspect as soon as one provides the AIO CPU cooler, particularly relating to routing the pipes. For this final step, earlier SFF expertise together with Optimum Tech’s assessment^[1], and Thor Zone’s information^[2] have been very useful.

Outcomes

I’m impressed a PC case this small exists. Mjolnir makes a Streacom DA2, an particularly tiny chassis itself, look huge when positioned aspect by aspect.

I used to be additionally fairly proud of the thermals. In my configuration, the CPU scorching air is exhausted vertically by means of the highest panel and the GPU exhausts in the direction of the again. I used Geeks3D Furmark to generate load and monitor thermal metrics by way of HWiNFO.exe. The CPU remained within the neighborhood of 46^C. No worries there.

By way of noise, it’s inconceivable to beat a passive DB4 however the CoolerMaster set to run at 30% as much as 50^C made the AIO barely audible more often than not.

Subsequent

And with that, we’re again in enterprise!