Hey Boost,
thanks for getting back to me, sorry it took me so long. Just busy as hell at work today.
I'm actually really torn between the sg07 and sg08, they seem to be the best mini-itx cases around. sg07 seems to have better cooling performance outta the box, and has more room for a nice cpu cooler afterwards. power supply being a 600 bronze is just fine. the power supply calculator page i use (
http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine) clocks the power requirement around 500w for the full system before overclocking, this is an overestimate using high end fans and regular desktop motherboard as well.
basically my build strategy is:
purchase mini-itx case with best cooling properties (sg07/08 most likely, they seem to have excellent cooling and come with sufficient power, noise isn't really a huge issue.)
purchase zotac z68 mobo (firmware has been updated and it seems quite nice these days)
remove wifi mini pcie card, install pcie adapter
use spacers to mount sound card to ceiling of case after removing bracket/shield, sound card is an ht omega claro 7.1 chosen for quality and size. not entirely committed to it but it looks really good.
reroute sound card i/o out back of case where removed wifi antennae were, possibly involving some light cutting. hoping i can just run the cables right out and then clean up the look without using a passthrough coupler/adapter thing (like vga to vga, for example)
purchase a high end pcie 2.0 graphics card with low thermals (pcie 3.0 isn't supported on this, idk if it's worth getting one) currently looking at the 6970 selection. I'll need to look through some different options and pick the highest performance:temp ratio one, this is one of the hard parts I think.
small 60gb mushkin enhanced chronos ssd for boot drive, western digital something or other for storage, slim optical because they aren't completely obsolete yet, 8gb 2133mhz ram lowest cl possible, these seem to be the easiest components to pick...
fill remaining space with cpu cooler and maybe some additional sinks
check thermals and power usage prior to overclocking
go from there...
Those cases you linked are pretty nice, I hadn't ever seen the xpc shuttle ones. They would be perfect for what i'm trying to do but their psu is insufficient unfortunately
There was a couple lian li cases I seriously considered.. the pc-q08, pc-tu200, and the T1 (test spider) I think I'll revisit their cases before committing to the silverstone choices.
Sorry if I'm babbling, really long day, thinking out loud and a couple whiskys deep. Does this seem like a pipe dream build or do you think the temps will be manageable in the finished item? Worried about cable management and cooler clearance with the roof-mounted sound card as well. Basically just planning right now, I don't own any parts for this yet. Trying to get a cohesive game plan together before I start picking up hardware.
Thanks for the input man, really great to have someone to bounce ideas off of for this.
edit:// I was looking at the corsair H60 or H50 as a possible cpu cooler (similar to the kuhler you linked), pretty sure I could find a spot on the case I wasn't too attached to and cut a spot. Running out of real estate on the outside and inside of the case though, probably wouldn't work. I'll hunt around for some other gpu options, thanks again.