Question Low profile case for a 3570K and and MSI Z77 MPower mobo ?

[James Blonde]

My backup PC is an i5 3570K (stock cooler) on an MSI Z77 Mpower board, 32Gb RAM, GTX1070 plus 5 or 6 hard drives (4 x 3.5" and maybe a couple of SSD). This is in a Fractal Design R4 case. I remote desktop to it and have basically been using it as a backup server, Plex media server, printer server and use it for torrenting.

I'm changing the use case for this PC and I'd really like to get a smaller case and shrink this as much as possible, but it may be I'm limited by the motherboard size here. The Define R4 is a pretty large case and takes up lots of room. I'll probably take over an SSD for OS and an HDD for storage. I see no point in keeping the graphics card - I can sell it, or sell it as part of a system I'm upgrading. I

I bought a 4 bay QNAP NAS last year with 40Tb storage, and a 4 bay extension case for it last week, so I'm proposing to move most of the hard drives to the NAS and use the NAS for file / backup storage and as the Plex media server. I put in some ethernet cabling last year, so most of my IT is now hard wired - including the large format printer that once needed a printer server.

So the only reason I want this PC now is for torrenting. I can't see any other use cases for it. I could potentially have done this on the NAS, but I'm more comfortable with Windows than the NAS software, and doesn't seem a sensible thing to do on a NAS anyway.

I could go out and buy a smaller desktop PC sized machine, but given I've got the hardware and it's probably good enough, I'm not sure I can justify it.

Any case suggestions for this???

(or, is this just a stupid idea?!)

 

[Karadjgne]

and doesn't seem a sensible thing to do on a NAS anyway.

Absolutely do Not want anything torrent related to be anywhere near a Nas, until proven safe. I'd even advise using VM's with seperated/dedicated drives from the OS.

Yes, you'll be limited to ATX cases, that's a motherboard restriction, but lacking a gpu, ATX will be the only restriction. There are much smaller cases than the Defines, I had the same setup but an R5 (still have) which are closer to Full Tower size than ATX mid.

Much will depend on budget, but being what it is, you can get ATX cases for less than $50. I like the Corsair Carbide 175R, but it's not less than $50...

 

[James Blonde]

Cost less of an issue than size, form and function - happy to pay for the right thing and its not much more than £50 (though out of stock). That looks nice, though yeh, see what you mean about the size. Maybe I do need to go to a smaller form factor system then?

Never dealt with VMs before - that was one of the things I was going to try on the NAS but NAS isn't powerful enough for Windows and I'm just too stuck in my ways to try anything else. Hence keeping the old PC. Might look into VMs a bit further then. But yeh, you've just confirmed my thoughts about segregation of tasks!

When I realised that I couldn't / didn't want to go all in on the NAS, I did toy with getting rid of the NAS and just going back to using my backup PC as my NAS and stuffing it full of disks. Honestly feels like I've got too many boxes!

 

[Karadjgne]

Virtual Machines are just that, virtual. They have no ties to the base pc other than by proximity. So basically it's like running 2x or more seperate pc's in one box but being virtual not actual, if you shut it down, it's gone like it never existed. All data, data corruption, virus, malware, gone. So when using questionable software or downloads, you get to see the results without having it tied to the base OS or any other personal data.

 

[James Blonde]

I get what a virtual machine is, but does Windows 10 / 11 support virtualisation? Always assumed it wouldn't and would be reserved for a server OS so never even considered looking into it. If it does support it, is it fairly easy to set up? and how resource intensive? (I guess as resource intensive as I choose it to be, but...?) in other words, could I use my primary PC and then not need to go down this route of keeping / downgrading my backup system?

FWIW, As I understand it, my NAS will only really support CLI type virtual machines, and I've never been a CLI type of user. I did try running a virtual windows 10 instance but it was so painfully slow as to be pretty much unusable. Which is what brought me back to keeping my old desktop.

 

[Misgar]

I'm running Microsoft Windows 10 Hyper-V virtual machines on everything from a dual core G3258 Pentium with 8GB DDR3 RAM up to a 7950X with 64GB DDR5 RAM.

The disadvantage of Hyper-V is it's not available in Windows 10 Home (or 11?). You need Windows Professional, Enterprise or Education for Hyper-V, unless you're prepared to make unofficial tweaks to Home.

An alternative to Microsoft would by VirtualBox, but I haven't tried this.

You must enable virtualization in the motherboard UEFI/BIOS. In Windows, you need to open Control Panel, Programs and Features, Turn Windows features on or off, then tick the box next to Hyper-V. For good measure you can also enable Windows Sandbox further down the list.

You don't need much in the way of resources if you're not running anything processor or memory intensive in the VM. On my G3258, the VM runs quite happily in less than 4GB RAM. If you leave Hyper-V set to Dynamic RAM Allocation, the amount of system RAM used by the VM shrinks down to 1.5GB when idle.

VMs are a good way to compartmentalise programs and test out new applications. VMs also provide a degree of isolation from unwanted effects that could corrupt the main (host) machine. If things go wrong in a VM, you can either roll back to an earlier snapshot, or delete the VM entirely and re-instate an earlier version of the same VM from backup.

You do however need a fair amount of free space on a drive for each VM, typically at least 50GB, preferably on an SSD. You can run VMs from hard disk but they're slower. Snapshots can cause a VM to gain size to such an extent, it sometimes fills a small SSD. I run some of my VMs with snapshots turned off.

 

[geofelt]

You might look at the silverstone HTPC cases.

https://www.silverstonetek.com/en/product/computer-chassis/?page=1&filter=HTPC_Desktop&sort=Newsest

An example:

https://www.newegg.com/silverstone-gd09b-black/p/N82E16811163257?quicklink=true

 

[LeandroRaul]

My backup PC is an i5 3570K (stock cooler) on an MSI Z77 Mpower board, 32Gb RAM, GTX1070 plus 5 or 6 hard drives (4 x 3.5" and maybe a couple of SSD). This is in a Fractal Design R4 case. I remote desktop to it and have basically been using it as a backup server, Plex media server, printer server and use it for torrenting.

I'm changing the use case for this PC and I'd really like to get a smaller case and shrink this as much as possible, but it may be I'm limited by the motherboard size here. The Define R4 is a pretty large case and takes up lots of room. I'll probably take over an SSD for OS and an HDD for storage. I see no point in keeping the graphics card - I can sell it, or sell it as part of a system I'm upgrading. I

I bought a 4 bay QNAP NAS last year with 40Tb storage, and a 4 bay extension case for it last week, so I'm proposing to move most of the hard drives to the NAS and use the NAS for file / backup storage and as the Plex media server. I put in some ethernet cabling last year, so most of my IT is now hard wired - including the large format printer that once needed a printer server.

So the only reason I want this PC now is for torrenting. I can't see any other use cases for it. I could potentially have done this on the NAS, but I'm more comfortable with Windows than the NAS software, and doesn't seem a sensible thing to do on a NAS anyway.

I could go out and buy a smaller desktop PC sized machine, but given I've got the hardware and it's probably good enough, I'm not sure I can justify it.

Any case suggestions for this???

(or, is this just a stupid idea?!)

Can you tell me what factors should you consider when selecting a case for your backup PC, and how can you determine if a particular case will be compatible with your existing components?