Project Build Update

The last time I wrote about this build (lunchbox 2) was back in July of 2012. For the better part of the year I have put it to use at multiple LANs and as a backup PC for people to use at our own LANs as well. It has performed perfectly for me but those who know me know I’m not one to leave things alone. I’m planning on a replacement in the form of an even more powerful build soon, but until then I have performed a few upgrades to the Lunchbox 2 and will be documenting them here.

I left the GTX 670 in as it is, even almost a year later, a great card. I upgraded the CPU up from an i5-2500K to an i7-2700K, it is still Sandy Bridge but a nice little bump in speed (3.5Ghz or 3.9Ghz with turbo). Along with that I upgraded the heatsink from the stock cooler to a Thermalright AXP-100, we will actually be covering this heatsink very soon as well but I can tell you right now that it’s a nice little heatsink for someone who has very little room for cooling.

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On the storage side of things I still have the Samsung 820 SSD as an OS drive that I had originally installed in the rig using double sided sticky tape. Because of the size of our power supply, our drive enclosure had to be removed causing me to get creative to mount the Samsung SSD. This time around I took the Samsung drive as well as a Seagate Momentous XT 750 Gb drive (new to this build) and I mounted them in the 5.25 inch bay. Because of their light weight I wasn’t worried about having to mount them from both sides, instead I mounted them both using two screws each on the one side. Attaching both screws on the one side making them float holds them up very well and also keeps them spaced out well, I would never do that with a 3.5 inch hard drive though!

As I mentioned before, with this build originally I had to remove the hard drive cage because of the size of the power supply that we used. After making all of these changes it didn’t feel right just shoving that large power supply back into the case without rethinking that as well. I put a lot of thought into it because the smaller I went would mean more open space in the case overall aka more airflow. Silverstone had a few options and they gave us open range to pick whatever we needed for the build. I was tempted to go with one of their small ATX power supplies that have a depth of 140mm’s (smallest on the market). Rather than go with that, I found a small SFX power supply with an ATX to SFX adapter plate that would do the job as well and be even smaller.  The ST45SF-G is what I went with, a 450 watt modular power supply in the SFX form factor.

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Some of you may be wondering how we could go with such a small wattage. Just to be sure, I popped the GTX 670 on our big test bench with the monster 3860X CPU, SSD, HDD, motherboard, and even water cooling and we saw peak wattage of 378 watts leaving a nice buffer still as well as the difference in power consumption from the 6 core to the Sandy Bridge CPU.

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garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #30730 15 May 2013 19:54
Today we take a look at a few updates we have made to our Lunchbox 2 LAN rig including dropping down to a SFX form factor PSU to improve airflow!
Plague's Avatar
Plague replied the topic: #30739 16 May 2013 00:28
that PSU is so small for that 450w power output. Very cool for that briefcase size case.
garfi3ld's Avatar
garfi3ld replied the topic: #30861 18 May 2013 05:14
I will have this rig at nexus lan this weekend if anyone is interested in taking a closer look

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