4.7L small form factor case
When I finished Cougar QBX small form factor case build (19.9L), I decided to try something even smaller. The best price for the quality choice for me was a 4.7L case from Custom MOD.
The most interesting for me was to compare performance and noise level differences between both cases. Also, I decided to left two 120mm fans within Cougar QBX to keep the bigger case build to real-world usage.
As far as the main goal of this build was rather a multimedia PC than performance king. I used: AMD Ryzen 3 3200g with integrated graphics, ASRock Fatal1ty B450 mini-ITX, Kingston HyperX Fury Black (2 x 4GB), M.2 Samsung 860 EVO and low profile Noctua cooler NH-L9i chromax.black.
I haven’t found any performance diferences and temperatures were almost the same on idle and after 15 minutes of CPU stress-test.
But the noise level surprised me. And it was a painfull difference.
The main reason was the PSU fan. I used Corsair SF450 for Cougar build and Seasonic SSP-250SUB for Custom MOD. The second one is much smaller and has a small noisy fan. I’ve made research and decided to replace the fan with the Noctua NF-A4x20 FLX.
As far as the fan’s connector was different I used the OmniJoin adapter set to connect the fan to PSU.
The results were amazing.
But then I noticed the reason: fan was not spinning at all. I wrote an email to Seasonic support and checked the web for similar cases. The answer was related to the fans configs and it looked like PSU will produce enough wattage to spin Noctua fan only on critical loads.
My config does not produce it even after 25 minutes of the CPU stress test. It was a bit careless to wait for critical temperatures and it was not an option to use an old fan. So I decided to use the motherboard’s fan connector and rely on CPU temperature. It worked extremely well.
I’m happy with the overall results: the Custom MOD case looks awesome, it is extremely small and the noise level is great for such a small PC!
UPD: It was possible to change the fan from the 15mm version to 25mm. The noise level decreased by 5db and temperature by 3 degrees.
