a while back we got a tweet from a viewer who suggested we take a look at
the S4 Mini by NFC a completely unheard
of Indie outfit run by this guy Josh
sniffing well I'm not sure what he's been sniffing but it must be some pretty
good stuff because basically out of his garage He is building what appears to be
by far the smallest case for custom
gaming PC Builders out there measuring
just 2 and2 in thick the diminutive S4
Mini case pushes the definition of small
form factor cases to the absolute breaking point but will it break when we
try to cram a Zotac GTX 1080 and a core
i7 7700 K into a system that's even
smaller than the PlayStation 4 there's
only one way to find out
out we're hosting LTX 2017 on July 29th
2017 it's a Meetup Tech Carnival thing
and uh it's going to be a lot of fun learn more at the link in the video
description distilling a gaming PC down
to this degree comes at a cost the the S4 Mini has no front IO to speak of the
CPU Cooler and RAM module clearance is 40 mm and GPU options that don't require
some uh creativity are pretty limited
thankfully more powerful mini cards have come into fashion and our MSI GTX 1060
ocv1 fit quite easily without even being
so tight inside that we couldn't fit two
2 and 1/2 in drives which will take gladly but even that it's probably not
enough so what other tricks did they use
well unlike oems like MSI and Zotac the
S4 Mini uses an off-the-shelf miniitx
motherboard and a desktop graphics card
but like them they're relying on a main
external power brick with a high efficiency DC todc power supply mounted
inside there are a handful of options including some lower cost ones for more
pedestrian system configs but to give ourselves some breathing room we are
using a Dell 300 30 W brick with an hdplex 300 power
supply inside now without any modifications we
ended up with what we'd consider to be a pretty decent machine we've got a low
voltage core i7 7700t a GTX 1060 16 gigs of Vengeance
lpx memory and an mp500 m.2 SSD for
Speed and a little bit of space saving savings behind the video card and firing
it all up we found ourselves greeted with actually pretty great thermal and
acoustic performance it's right in the middle of the other competitors in our
recent small form factor case Roundup impressive perhaps even most impressive
but I wouldn't call it a Jedi if it was another one of those stupid looks great
but can't perform cases would I well
good news my friends the limit here is not our power supply or our thermals
thanks to the S4 Mini's perforated side panels just volume so let's see then how
far we can push our luck I mean if we
look at our CPU cooling results we've got a lot of Headroom there so step one
we go ahead and upgrade to a
7700k as for the RAM well come on this
stuff's clearly not cool enough for a rig like this but ah ah A Stroke of Luck
Corsair contacted us and asked if we wanted a sample of their new Dominator
Platinum special edition torque we took
one look at that stuff and said f yeah
seriously orange fins and labeling heat
treated titanium styling on the top bar
32 gigs of this was definitely worth the
$75 we paid to have Josh overnight ship
us a custom hot rod style side panel to
go with it moving on to the GPU while we
were scratching our heads trying to figure out how to get something bigger
than a 1060 in here I mean we're kind of
coming to the point where we can almost fit a card like Zotac GTX 1080
mini if only the case were a little
bigger or the card were a little
smaller so if
we yes my friends I hope you saw this
one coming because we went there after taking the plastic shroud off we
carefully trimmed down the rear of the
heat sinks fins as close to the heat pipe as we D to no not that close dang
it Ivan so one quick call to Zotac and
another overnight shipment later and it's time for round
two now we're talking now we can get the
card inside the S4 Mini but the stock
cooling is still an issue but if we
can't fit a Noctua F12 maybe a
Silverstone slim 120 mil on this Mount
here will be enough fire up fir Mark
and crap okay let's go back to the Noctua n
ff12 i mean it's only a couple millim
off so I think you can see where we're going with this we shaved off just
enough to make it fit in under the 120 mil fan mounts and make it fit we did I
mean this is lonus Tech tips we always fit it in there if you know what I mean
as for temperatures though we're stable in the high 80s we made it work but it
was a little loud due to the lack of clearance between the fan and the side
panel at about 50% fan speed though we
got to the point where our noise level was acceptable without giving up too
much of our GPU boost clock as for the
CPU with some careful undervolting and tweaking we got it to hold at 4.2 to 4.3
GHz boost under synthetic load staying
comfortably at 4.5 GHz that is full
turbo under Li workloads like games our
Dominator Platinum Torx didn't want to go past 2400 MHz but this is an x99 kit
on a z170 board with a seventh gen chip so we made up the difference by
tightening up the timings as far down as they'd go and all of this taken together
gives us this tiny gaming rig whose only
outward indication of its potency is the
ba RAM vent and maybe the massive
external power brick so let's take a few moments then to put into perspective the
sheer amount of raw power contained in
this little box we only planned to run a
couple of benchmarks you know just to make sure that it was working okay but
we were so blown away that we had to run
more to make sure we weren't dreaming
our Decked Out S4 Mini runs with the
best single GPU systems we've tested
even beating out our KB Lake bench system with a Founders Edition card
thanks to the additional turbo enabled by an overclocked card and it comes in
at the top of the pack for what we've
ever seen in terms of performance per
liter now at $195 not including the power supply and
without a fancy paint job not to mention
the fact that it's completely sold out of pre-orders the S4 Mini slots in with
the rest of our premium small form factor cases it's compact reasonably
lightweight features rugged aluminum construction is near impossible to
actually buy and isn't the easiest thing to work in but so far this is the
closest I think I've seen to the idea that I pitched to Cooler Master four
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