As some of you know I love SFF (Small Form Factor) cases, also some of you may remember I used to own a Shuttle X, the SN95G5 chassis. There are photos of it on the Krostech site.
Well that PC is no longer mine. I sold it to a friend a fair while ago now, and since have not really needed a high spec rig, so I have been running basic Intel© Pentium© 4 PC’s. They just don’t seem to cut it anymore, and as my current Machine has finally died I see this as a great time to upgrade to a:
‘High Power Gamming Rig’
I’ve never really owned a real Gamming rig before. The shuttle was the closest. Running a skt 939 3700+ x2 chip 1.5GIG memory and 256MEG graphics.
The thing keeping me of building a gamming rig is size, as I can’t seem to bring myself to own a full sized pc.
So now that I have decided to build a gamming rig, I have been looking around at parts and realised that I can still keep a rather small footprint even for gamming rig. I’m going to stay with SFF, but in the way of a Silverstone Temjin© TJ08 MATX (Micro ATX) case. The TJ08 takes a full size ATX power unit which is a must in a gamming system, and has enough room to fit the new Nvidia© 8800GTX series cards, which is surprising as not many mid towers can even accommodate the sheer size of the GTX series as they conflict with the hard drive bays.

Another advantage of the TJ08 is its cooling system, utilising all the spare space available to created the coolest possible environment, with a 12CM fan at the front (in the perfect place to cool a large video card such as the 8800GTX which I plan on putting in there) and a rear exhaust fan also 12CM located above where you would expect n any mid tower case. These two fans create a near perfect airflow cooling the system extremely well so I have read from many a review.

I still have not decided exactly on Main board or processor yet, I am inclined to stick with AMD as they have never led me wrong in the past and I have had so many troubles with these Pentium©4 computers.
If any of you have a MATX main board you would recommend that has PCIE 16x and GIG lan with onboard video and 8channel audio would be great thanks. The reason for wanting the onboard video and 8channel audio is simple, building a SFF PC you don’t have room for a aftermarket sound card (as much as I’d like a brand new X-FI©) and onboard video simply explained also, as I will be building the rig slowly and cannot afford a video card at this point in time and will be running onboard for a few weeks.

I plan to run dual 22” wide LCD panels, I’m opting for the LGE© L226WTQ-BF as it has 3000:1 contrast ratio, which basically blows me away. It was a tossup between that and the ASUS© VW222U with 2000:1 contrast ratio.

I estimate the full system to cost me around $3500.00 when completed. But to start the build I will only be spending around $600.00 to purchase CPU, Main board, Memory and the case.

Any thoughts or advice as to parts to consider would be greatly appreciated.

p.s. Don’t even try to change my mind about SFF it’s made up, for a few reasons. Number 1 reason is space, and as we all know SFF cases look freaking AWESOME!!!