I recently got hold of a Silverstone SG05 mini ITX chassis to build a small and portable gaming PC. The aim was to build a small, yet powerful machine that would be easy to haul around.
Anyway, the specifcations consist of the following:
Zotac GeForce 9300-ITX WiFi (miniITX motherboard)
Intel E5400 (2.7GHz) Pentium Dual core CPU. (Overclocked to 3.2 GHz)
2GB OCZ DDR800 RAM
Silverstone SG05 miniITX chassis with 300w PSU
Seagate 500GB 7200rpm Hard disk.
To start I left the machine running with just its onboard discrete graphics card (Geforce 9300). The motherboard has a full 16x PCI Express slot, but I am still deciding which graphics card will be best. (I am leaning towards an ATI 5770 for it’s low power consumption, good size and decent speed). However I saw quite a few people asking around as to what kind of cards will actually fit into the SG05 chassis and whether or not they would be able to run on the 300w PSU.
I have this Sapphire ATI 4870 512MB graphics card running in my main gaming PC. It is running a custom bios that I flashed to it a while ago, upping the default GPU core speed from 725MHz to 795MHz and the default memory speed of 900MHz to 1100MHz (4400MHz effective). It therefore uses slightly more juice than a stock 4870. I wanted to see if this card would fit or not and how it would handle running on the 300w PSU of the SG05. Well the answer is yes, it fits! Barely. It took quite a bit of manouvering to get it in there and a fair bit of time to wiggle the auxillary power connectors into the 6 pin power sockets on the end of the PCB. Here are some photos for those interested:
The motherboard to start:
The card resting on the chassis to size it up.
Finally in!
Here is a short video of the card running 3D Mark 2005.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgrUHZlbrAo
Great Build!
Thanks dna, You should also take a look at the SG06 – slightly better looking case. Also I hear that the SG07 is coming out soon – this is going to feature a full 600w ATX type PSU – along with the obvious mini-ITX form factor support. I wouldn’t recommend running a 4870 or similar card in the SG05 24/7 but a slightly less powerful card such as the 4850 should be fine. That being said, you never know – perhaps if I left my 4870 running 24/7 it would be just fine. Post a link to your setup once you get it going, I would love to see how it looks.
Wow! I didn’t think that a 300W psu could handle the OC and a 4870. Good job. I was looking for a mini itx case that would fit a full sized psu and video card, but I may just consider this case instead.