Video Card

I mentioned it earlier, but this build has been a long time coming. Not only was it a little overdue, but I actually started the Lunchbox 4 build all the way back in January with planning even before that. Think about how much has changed in that time in PC hardware, hell even in just the past two months the GPU market has been completely changed with new models from both AMD and Nvidia. I was originally going to go with the Sapphire R9 380 ITX Compact that I covered back in February. I loved the card and it was a small upgrade over the R9 285 ITX from Sapphire in Lunchbox 3. As I mentioned in my review that card ran a little warm, even on our test bench. So when I originally built Lunchbox 4 I fought with thermal issues. I will go into more detail in the cooling section about this, but the 380 running a little warm combined with an overheating CPU and a case that was completely under cooled. The ITX 380 just wasn’t going to work for me. So I was working on getting in a Nano Fury that would be considerably faster but for multiple months I was in shipping hell. It originally ended up delivered to a completely different state and lost. Then the second one was returned and FedEx didn’t think my house existed. Well in that time the new cards came out and with that new opportunities.

That leads me to my review of the Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition from last week. It wasn’t an ITX form factor card, but as it turns out it fit into the Metis because I went with the smaller SFX power supply and the low wattage usage of the GTX 1060 is perfect for small form factor builds. Not only that but the top notch 1080p performance was a great fit with the 1080p monitor that I keep in my LAN bag. I went into a LOT more detail on the Zotac GTX 1060 AMP! Edition in my review last week, so if you are interested in checking it out. Here is a link to the coverage.

I actually think I could fit the longer Founders Edition GTX 1060 if we wanted, check out all of that extra room!