[Build Log] Mini-ITX PC - Middle School

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With this case, the lid/side panel locks in place and screws shut. It's a structural part too so the case is a kind of monocoque. At the start, the machine will be running flat, with the top open, in case any adjustments need to be made and so I can see if the airflow is disturbing things. Once it goes, the lid goes on and stays on (famous last words). Se ill/should be ready to fire it up at the end of next week.

We get more cabling done today, and start to organize things. We need the two SATA cables, the power to the drives, and the 4 pin motherboard cable to do as well as the WiFi antenna leads which fall off if you look at them funny. Also, a lot of cable management.

Tonight is the school dance, until 10:30pm, so it will be along day for me as a chaperone. Middle school is a little tougher for men because the great majority of the teachers are women and so the burden of the 'man' duties falls on comparatively few people, although this year is an improvement, although a male teacher left, two new ones arrived, so we now have seven :).
 


I'm good with ti.

@Tiny Voices: Totally different problem, I hope you can point me in the right direction. About once a day the site here logs me off and will not let me log back in claiming dud username/password.

I have to ask for a new password every day to get back on. It's annoying. Do I need to do somethng different? Who handles this stuff?

 


jpishgar is probably your best bet. Hes the community manager.

But yeah its a bug that I find often too.

I usually just clear out my cookies and saved password for this site, then retry. Give that a try before PMing him.

 
As far as I know, I don't save passwords and my defenses vigorously throw out cookies. As a teacher my computers are under almost constant assault from the outside because of all the activities of my 80 or so students.

Thanks for the heads up.
 
I get logged out sometimes too. Ever since we switched to Amazon servers here, all kinds of weird things happen when the servers are indexing. If you get logged out, get 404errors, get 500 errors it is not you. It is the site.
 
The latest work is on cable management.

You can see that there are a lot of cables to go in a small space.

29de83k.jpg


72q3co.jpg


In particular there are the light colored two wire cables from the front panel; power, reset, and the two LEDs. I decided that they needed to be routed around behind the PSU cage. However the small space, plugs on the end, and the ventilation holes make this a dodgy proposition. So I made a precision, high-tech cable guide (available on-line for only 9.95 plus S+H) :)

10h86r7.jpg


It worked so well with one cable that I bundled them with zip ties and:

14tv9s8.jpg


That's much neater, and we were able to route the four pin power cable around the motherboard.

m9t6rp.jpg


That was all. Some of the students had never even used a cable/zip tie before. !
 


I know the feeling, some of my peers don't even know what a cassette is.

Anyway, something on topic. Nice cabling 😛
for the smaller cables to keep there smaller form-factor, I recommend twist ties or simple string.
 
I don't like twist ties because of the metal core which vibrations can expose over time.

I understand not knowing what a cassette is, they are no longer in common use, but zip ties are enormously useful for so many things.

I'm using 100mm ties, so they are very compact.
 


I have no idea what type of twist ties your using but none I've ever used have any sort of metal in them.
I use the ones that normally come with your PSU's cables or your case cables

 
Easily. The card fits on the underside of the riser with the SSD on it, lying flat and parallel to the motherboard, on top of the two fans underneath. (up to over 13" in length).

There's room under there for the PCI-e cable too.

You can see the underside of the riser to the right and to the far right the socket into which the GPU will plug. Looking at the back of the case you can see where the double slot card will connect to the outside world.

v6t9q0.jpg
 
Call this build NB01

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($187.94 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock H97M-ITX/AC Mini ITX LGA1150 Motherboard ($82.98 @ Newegg)
Memory: Patriot Viper 3 Low Profile Blue 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($67.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Crucial MX100 128GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($69.93 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($54.98 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 Video Card ($339.99 @ NCIX US)
Case: Silverstone SG05BB-450-USB3.0 (Black) Mini ITX Desktop Case w/450W Power Supply ($114.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $918.79
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-10-28 20:23 EDT-0400

Have OS, keyboard, monitor and 250GB 5400rpm HDD.

Wants to spend less if possible? ($900 budget)
 

would he be willing to drop the ssd? SSD would't be used to its full.
And plus it seems like a gaming build. he would't notice any real world performance drop a part from boot times
 
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