18:17
It's a spicy pizza box. I'm not going to drop it. It's not Linus Tech Tips. Although, we probably will be using a Liz Tech depth screwdriver. You guys asked for this. You asked me for this. I wasn't sure, but it was like, okay, well, we can do this one. Uu half depth. What do you build? Let's build it. We're going to have to do a couple different build options, but one U half depth. This would be your new small business server or edge router or something. Okay, first off from Silverstone. This is pretty inexpensive considering it's uh a substantial amount of metal. That's the deal with Silverstone. Tends to be higher quality stuff. This is their one U case. This is what you get
by default. You get three fans, some mounting hardware. There's a box of mounting accessories and some cable stuff. These fans don't move a ton of air. We're probably going to have to upgrade them. That's okay. It's a oneU rack mount. It's made for like a relay rack kind of a thing, but it still has screw holes on the side so you can support it with a shelf for more support, which you definitely should do. It has one 3 and 1/2 in bay, which is externally accessible. Silverstone has some accessories you can put in this bay. the kinds of things you can put in here. Hot swap bays for two and a half inch drives or a sled for some other
kind of removable thing or E3 drives or whatever. We've also covered a lot of IC do accessories. You could put IC do 2 and 1/2 in drive adapters in here and be able to do that. If you're looking to not spend a lot of money, you could 3D print an adapter that'll hold two 2 and 1/2 in drives in your 3 and 1/2 in bay. Although there's room to mount underneath. You could wedge in a SATA, you know, short height 2 and 12 in drive underneath this. The other thing you may be thinking is, wait a minute, don't I have to deal with a proprietary power supply? No. Flex ATX. Oh, look at that FX600Z. I also happen to have a power supply from Silverstone. This power supply is getting really popular in
small form factor builds. Take a look at the Dr. Zaber stuff. Dr. Zaber's making uh noises about having a new case. I've got a little bit of a preview of some Dr. Zaber stuff you should check out for like the living room form factor. The smart thing that's happening here is that accessories that are designed for one U are sort of making their way into the living room and making their way into more quiet machines. Now, obviously, this machine is not going to be designed for the living room, but as you'll hear, the power supply fan and our 600 watt power supply here is actually quiet enough to be used in a living room. And that is why Dr. Zaber used this Flex ATX form factor for their
power supply for their small form factor prototype case. Like exploring some options, it works great in our OneU case here at 600 watts because we're not going to be putting any kind of monster GPU in here is plenty. Now, the astute observers among you will notice that this 1U case could actually fit a full-size ATX motherboard. CPU cooling is going to be a little interesting, which we'll talk about, but you could actually put a full ATX motherboard in here. I think that's actually a bit of a waste of space because if you have an ITX or a miniatx motherboard, you'll have a little more room not having the PCB to deal with to shove more stuff in this end of the case. I sort of wish that Silverstone
had another mounting option for a full fan bracket. I might end up doing a 3D printable accessory as we often do to just extend the 40 mil fans the rest of the way down so that I can get more air flow through this thing. At the rear, we do have a single expansion slot cut out. Silverstone does have a right angle accessory, a right angle PCIe slot accessory. I have a PCIe cable that I'm just going to use, so it's fine. Now, I had sort of teased using a Minis Forum motherboard for this, and this is because Minis Forum from time to time has sales on their ITX and MicroATX cases. This is a 16 core AMD CPU. I think the BD775 is on sale right now at the time that I'm doing this video. And that is a
screaming fast little machine for a home server or edge server. Now, Minis Fororum not exactly designed for 247 operation. There are some horror stories of people out there buying and then the machine dies and then service takes a little while. Doesn't really matter if you're running a cluster two, three, four of these. If you're using it for the small business case, that's what you should be doing anyway. That's a best practice. But generally, they've been pretty reliable
in a home lab. There's a lot of people on our forum that have been running these in the home lab. And so, that's more of an exception outlier than the rule. And the design here is almost perfect. Front to back air flow through the heat sink. There's an exhaust out the back. This could work. Some of you rightly pointed out when I teased this in our community and some of the other videos. The ram is going to block the heat sink. We have to test that. You may be right that this may be a non-starter before we even get started. Or it may require more air pressure. Probably just more air pressure. I don't know. We'll see. There's this weird little ATX door cover thing at the back. I don't even
know why Silverstone would include this. It should just be a cutout. This is an extra step in manufacturing. You don't need or at least I don't understand the reason for needing it. Now, the first problem you run into is that the cutout for the ATX is too tall. You're going to be running your Minis 4 motherboard without an IO shield. You're also going to have to mount a motherboard standoff right there. You just break off that little piece of insulation plastic. It goes right there. The accessory box comes with screws and mounts for the power supply. Uh some accessory mounts for the 3 and 12 in drive bay. Get a little accessory bag extra standoffs. There is an included accessory that will mount here that will
hold two 2 and 1/2 in drives. So you can do that as well. [clears throat] Now, for this kind of a setup, Minisform motherboard does actually have three four pin fan headers, but those fan cables, they're really short. They're not going to make it. Fortunately, Minis form has got some extension cables in the box. I would recommend a 1 to three Y adapter though instead of using all three headers. So, just plan on ordering a 1 to three Y cable. Our 600 watt power supply goes right there. Now, in our accessory bundle, we have some Molex and SATA style device power cables. have the dedicated, you know, 6 plus two pin PCIe power coming from a 12v2 connector. And we also have a dedicated GPU 12V2
connector. And you can pick between if you want two more 6 plus2 PCIe connectors or if you want the 12V2 style connector, but it's limited to 300 watts because you need another 300 watts for the rest of the system. So on the power supply itself, there are two 12v2 looking connectors. On this side of the power supply, they're not actually 12v2. One of the 12v2 looking connectors on the power supply side goes to two eightpin connectors for CPU power. The other option is PCIe style power which is 6 plus2 or native 12v2. And this does have the four sense pins. So this will work up to 300 watts for a 300 watt GPU. And so you could use CPU plus this or basically you have a choice of the old
style or 12v2 style power for a GPU plus dual 8 pin connections for the motherboard which our motherboard only needs the one. The four pin connection is for molex and SATA. So you get two Molex and two SATA connections with the native cable. Might need to know that if you were going to run like four two and a half inch drives. And [clears throat] this is more or less what our internal layout ends up looking like. Got our power supply. You got some reasonable options for cable management and the voids around the power supply. There's a fair bit of room in here. Now, as you are coloring outside the lines a little bit using this Minis Swarmore motherboard in this kind of a use case,
heat dissipation is going to be critical. I can tell you that the Silverstone fans that are included, the 40mm fans, you can't hear them. This thing is on, but it's dead silent. On the kilowatt side, we're using 11.5 watts right now. It's not exactly idle, but I mean, there's nothing in here. It's literally just the motherboard and the RAM and one 980 Pro SSD. Yeah. Well, we're spiking around 60 watts, give or take. I feel pretty confident that 15 watts idle, especially when running Linux. It's about what we could expect in this configuration, but you're going to need more fans here. The fans ramping up a little bit because the uh CPU is getting a little toasty, especially without the cover. There's
also a configuration where because the fans are over there and the heat sink's over here. You have to have the cover on it. You can't run without the side. Most modern machines weren't designed to run without the side. It's like, I'm cool. I'm running my computer without the side. You're probably cooking it because it's designed for airflow with a closed case. Okay, good news. We've done some pre-esting and yeah, the Silverstone included fans are not sufficient for keeping our Minis Forum motherboard cool. But the good news is the solution is pretty inexpensive. These are Arctic S4028. These are 6,000 RPM fans. Arctic has two versions of this 40 millimeter fan. One is 6,000 RPM and the other one
is 15,000 RPM. These move a lot more air than the other. And you can see why because they're thicker. Now, when you're using these Arctic fans, it does actually work kind of mostly sort of to get air over the DIMs. I mean, there is a little bit of a gap between the top of the DIM and the top of the case. And our minor motherboard, these AMD CPUs, they really don't use that much power if you've got a reasonable amount of air flow that's running through the system. Arctic sells these in six-packs. You should get a six-pack. Silverstone has some other fan options, too. You should check out their accessories as well. But Arctic is really the underdog, like the unsung hero of a lot of cooling, whether
that's tower cooling or fans or anything else. I really like these fans, and that worked out really well as replacement fans for this build. Now, this can work. This is fine. There's nothing wrong with this. There are some creative things you can do here. You can put your operating system as a RAID one on two M.2. Remember, most of these minis form other boards do not have built-in SATA. Some do. This one doesn't. We've also got our X16 slot. And again, Minis Forum, some of them have bifurcation options, some of them don't. Minis Forum goes back and
adds bifurcation options. This particular board that I'm using here does have bifurcation. So, I can run an X4, X4, X4, X4. I could also add a SAS controller like this one, which will support up to eight SAS drives or SATA drives. And that gives me some options for some creative stuff I can do in here. I can also use a version of this that is an external controller, so I'd have external connections here. We did the garbage build for a disc shelf thing for Jake's backup. This as a control node for that, assuming that the cooling works properly, would be fine. You definitely would have to add six fans in the front. These get hot. They use a lot of power and they are designed
for crazy amounts of server air flow. So, you would definitely need six of the Arctic fans mounted in the front of this cooling from front to back. And you'll have to use double stick tape or something like that to mount them over here or a 3D printed accessory. If you do this, I want to see your build. Show us your SM100based build in the level one text forums and then I'll tag it in the video and other people can enjoy it and that'll be a lot of fun because people can see what you're building. Now, I think we should do a B build with something that's a little bit more toward an actual enterprise build. This is an LG A700 motherboard. This is from ASRock Rack. This is a W680D4U.
Sometimes you can get these pretty inexpensively on eBay. It's a little relative in our winter of parts shortages being everything on fire. I had these left over from an Intel project that I was working on for LGA 1700. Um, it could work okay. You don't want to put a 13900 K or a 14900 K or anything like that in here. You want a low power CPU. The T series, those are 35 watts. They're obviously going to use more than 35 watts, but those are 35 watts. That would be great for a build like this. And we've got all kinds of PCIe expansion, even though this is a microATX motherboard. What we're going to run with this is a 12700.
No K. That's a 65 watt CPU. The turbo is up to 120 watts. And it just so happens the XE01700A Silverstone makes a 1U cooler that is designed specifically for this setup. Now, you could use any LGA 1700 motherboard, but look, this CPU socket and this DIM orientation is oriented this way for frontto back air cooling. Let's get this set up and see how Silverstone's stock fans do with this configuration, even given we have this. Now, the TDP on this CPU from Silverstone is rated at 80 watts, which is under our 65 watts, but that'll give
us a little bit of turbo headroom, and I think that'll work out okay. I'm really glad we did a second build because it's got a couple cool things to show you. So, first is our expansion slot. The primary slot is not located at the top edge. It's only this X1, and it's not even open-ended. So, you could use an X1 right angle, but then that limits your full height slot to just one. You're out of luck, right? Not quite. The X16 slot placement on this motherboard is optimal. So, on our ITX motherboard, it was where our X1 slot is, but on this motherboard, it's down one, and that's really what this case is
designed for. So, if you get a right angle PCB, this will work perfectly with something like this. Like, you just have a little right angle coming out, and it'll work great with Silverstone accessory. Whereas when I was using the ITX motherboard, I would have to use a ribbon cable or something like that because the slot would actually be located here. You can kind of see if I hold our SAS card in place here, a right angle PCB would be perfect. And that's because our primary slot is offset by one. On an ITX motherboard, it would be in the other position and a right angle PCB wouldn't work. But you could use a ribbon cable, a PCIe riser ribbon cable or a riser that's designed for a one
slot offset. Generally, if you are going to do a build like this, I would recommend getting a board that's designed for a chassis like this, like this W680 motherboard where the sockets rotated and the memories moved and it's all about that front to back air flow. The minis forum works cuz it's a relatively low wattage CPU. Doesn't need a ton of air flow in the first place, but this is certainly more the correct flavor. Our Silverstone LG700 cooler in my preliminary testing is also holding up pretty well. It is basically an 85 watt TDP cooler. It's aluminum. It's not even copper. But for our 12700 with no overclocking whatsoever and running our memory at 5600, it's basically fine. In
a server context, I should point out that mixed P and E cores is still not really a first class citizen. You're may like if you're going to use this with VMware or something like that, you're going to have to disable the ecores. Proxmox can use it, but there is some unevenness, let's say, in the performance mixing load between the P and E cores. So, if you need a lot of cores, consider that as you're putting a build like this together. Also, again, just with the frontto back cooling, the CPU cooler is doing a lot of heavy lifting cooling the VRM here. The bigger 40 mil fans in the front, Silverstone or Arctic, more air flow definitely a good idea. Another thing to consider is the
dim height. This doesn't really support dims that have heat sinks. If you're going to use G-Skill, Trident Z, the heatsink sticks up a little bit. Not going to fit in here. I'm using Crucial desktop memory. Crucial is not a thing anymore because of course it's not on this timeline. You basically need naked dims. But the good news is that the DDR5 cooling problem in a case like this with good 40 mil fans not really a thing because the dims are oriented this way. A desktop motherboard has them oriented side to side. You run into the minis form problem where it's like it can work but you're going to need more air flow. Like that's probably a six fans at the front configuration, not a three fans at the
front configuration. You hear that? That's entirely the CPU fan. The CPU fan is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It's about as loud as the 6,000 RPM Arctic fans. Now, understand that if you are going to opt for a server class motherboard, it has a built-in what's called a bassband management controller or BMC uh IP management interface. It's got VGA output. There's a built-in monitor that's not part of the CPU. I mean, the 12700 has an iGPU, but there is actually a PCIe GPU built into the motherboard in that 8-speed remote control system. You see, there's a computer in here that boots up that controls the other
computer. So, you can remote into this thing even when it's off because it's getting standby power from the power supply. And that VGA output does work. And the VGA output is different and kind of sort of independent of the built-in iGPU. There's some crazy glue under the hood that makes the iGPU dump its frame buffer into the ASP 2600 so that you can kind of see the same thing on both. But the most reliable connection on a motherboard like this is through the VGA or through the IPMI. I've got it connected with HDMI here, but the HDMI is going to be a little squirly until first post and the bias has some configuration and that sort of thing. So, if you pick up a motherboard like this and you think it's dead, it's
probably not dead. You probably just need to hook up VGA. The other thing that I'll note is in our torture testing, moving upwards of 450 500 watts through the power supply, the power supply fan does become audible, but it's still way less audible than this. So, our hypothesis about reusing one UU server components in a living room type build that would be perfectly reasonable with this Silverstone Flex ATX power supply. It's a nice little discovery that we got along the way. Hey, look at that. We posted Oh, just to be even more explicit about the VGA thing, this also means that you could use F CPUs. Sometimes you can get a mini PC or a salvage mini PC that is maybe dead but has a working CPU. It's like a
12 700F or 12100F and i3 in this would be perfectly reasonable. You can use that in this platform because it has built-in VGA. The VGA counts as an add-in graphics card. So even though F there's no iGPU, that VGA output on this motherboard will still work. So, with this setup, we've got eight cores, eight P cores, and four efficiency cores. You're not really giving up a lot disabling those efficiency cores in a server workload. And this is ready for drives or expansion or whatever. It has four SATA ports on the built-in motherboard. It also has four Oculink ports, which is really just expansion for more SATA drive. You see, these motherboards are really designed
for uh a long disc shelf. So you can get the, you know, ASRock has some rack mount servers that are full depth and then there will be 12 three and a half inch drives at the front there. And this motherboard will host to something like that for a oneu storage server. Good luck buying hard drives in 2026. I'm sorry. For me, something like this would work great with that external SAS controller controlling the Jake backup garbage server shelf thing that I showed previously. And our power supply does support up to 240 volts input. So, I can put this on the 240 volt circuit with the disc shelf and have something special. 8 cores would be plenty to get that thing on the network. Plus, there's
a version of this motherboard that has built-in 10 GB. Not on this motherboard, but there you go. If you get creative with your M.2, you can add more network cards. There are network cards that are available that are M.2. So, you plug in M.2, you can have one or two Intel 2 and a half gig nicks. You can have a single 10 gig nick. You can get creative with your M.2 connections as well. But there you go. There's an SM100 build. What else you want to see? Install Proxmox, configure it, home server. What do you want to do? I'm Will. This is level one. This has been a level one build in the Silverstone SM100 cuz you wanted to see it. Uh, if you got any questions, uh, you can find me hanging out in the level
one forums. I'm signing out. I'll see you later.
