THE CONCLUSIONS
SAM LEWIS: Piecing this machine together was a walk in the park. Fewer parts doesn’t always equal easier, but Team AMD had luck on our side. No traditional radiator and cooler gave us more space to work with too. Compared with a few recent ITX builds, it’s like swapping from a Mini Cooper to a Dodge Ram. The case is pretty large, but we love it. We know we said it wasn’t about looks but if we were to rebuild, the RGB variant of this case would be a better choice—it’s a bit empty in there and it needs a little something extra.
The only issue we had with this build was securing the CPU cooler onto the backplate, as it was a bit tight. We had to apply a bit of pressure to the backplate to get at least one screw in to finish the rest off slowly, go diagonally, take your time. Ideally, we don’t want to put this pressure on the motherboard, but we also kind of needed the cooler. So, after some long hard thinking, we tried our luck.
After that, we had to get this thing up and running. With nothing coming up on our monitor, we knew we needed to update the mobo’s BIOS. Version 2423 was downloaded onto an empty FAT32 USB drive, we ran the renaming program, deleted the unnecessary files, and put it into the BIOS FLBK USB port on the back of the PC. Then we held the button down for a few seconds until it started flashing and let it do its thing. Once it booted, we loaded the Windows media creation tool onto another USB stick as per usual and got the OS installed too.
As a whole, this was a successful procedure with only a minor hiccup with some short screws. Not bad, right?
ZAK STOREY: I do love the smell of silicon in the morning. Especially when it goes pop. Actually no, it’s the worst. That burning smell screams “dead hardware” and sadly on power-up, that’s exactly what we experienced with this build, Just before the end of the shoot, we powered the PC on, just to see what it looked like with these three fans in the front of the case and, to our surprise, nothing lit up. The power was on, the PC was running, but no light.
Fast forward five minutes, and a bit of fiddling around later, and still nothing. Then, silence. The PC came to a standstill, fans refused to spin, motherboard refused to light up. Nothing, no power-button wiggling, different kettle leads, or any of our usual tweaks helped. Then the smell arrived, that awful smell of burnt silicon, electricity, and water.
The culprit was discovered—a shortcircuit on the RGB controller had burnt itself out, killing the power supply in the process. Fortunately, everything else was unharmed, but it just goes to show, leaving a once-tested case in a leaky, cold warehouse with an open box for a year, can sometimes lead to moisture build-up and eventual failure. Who knew? One new 500W power supply, and a lack of RGB later and we were good to go. You can have all the build experience in the world, but no matter what, there’s always bound to be something that can catch you out.