FEATURE / CUSTOMISATION
Alternatives
The three runners-up from this month’s Labs
test are all excellent options. The SilverStone
LD03 offers great cooling, has space for
120mm AIO coolers and its unique design
looks fantastic. The Phanteks Enthoo Evolv
Shift Air also offers good cooling, an even
more striking design, space for 120mm liquid
coolers and has the smallest footprint on test
as well as space for long graphics cards. If
you prefer tower cases then NZXT’s H200i
is also an excellent choice, especially if you
want to use some form of liquid cooling.
Finally, the third option from this month’s
Labs test is the Lian Li PC-Q37WX. You’ll
need to kit it out with fans in addition to
decimating your wallet, but the high price
brings lavish features and build quality
with huge scope for water cooling too.CPU cooler
Corsair H100i RGB Platinum
£110 inc VAT
cclonline.comUsing larger radiators usually means lower
noise levels, as the cooler can dissipate more
heat by using multiple slower fans, rather than
a single faster one. As such, 240mm all-in-
one (AIO) coolers hit the sweet spot, and the
Corsair H100i RGB Platinum is a great choice.
Its dazzling RGB lighting looks fantastic and its
powerful pump provides exceptional cooling.
It’s extremely quiet at low to medium
speeds, but Corsair’s iCUE software allows
full control over the pump and fans to
fine-tune them to your requirements.
We’ve mounted it in the side of our Metallic
GearNeoMini,pullingthewarmairfromour
CPUstraightoutofthecase.Thisalsoprovides
a greatviewoftheRGBfansthroughtheside
anel.Thecooleris morethanuptothetaskofcooling our Ryzen 9 3900X and can ramp up
cooling to extreme levels when needed while
remaining quiet in games and at low loads.Alternatives
If you prefer a cheaper, smaller liquid cooler
then Alphacool’s Eisbaer LT120 is a great
choice. It comes with an expandable loop,
two 120mm fans and can squeeze into tight
spaces, while its pump is very quiet too. If
air cooling is your game then Deepcool’s
Gammaxx GT BK is a fantastic cooler for AMD
Socket AM4, and it’s able to cope with the
heat dished out by AMD’s 8-core and 12-core
Ryzen CPUs for under £40. It also looks
great and it’s easy to fit, plus it includes clips
to mount a second 120mm fan if you need to
boost cooling or lower your noise levels by
having two fans spinning at lower speeds.Extra cooling
Corsair ML140 fan
£222 inc VAT
scan.co.ukTo balance the airflow in our PC, we added
a large, powerful fan to the front section
to counteract the mighty Corsair H100i
RGB Platinum cooler’s exhaust fans. It can
spin at up to 2,000rpm and will provide
the GPU and motherboard with greater
airflow than the 120mm fan provided with
the case. We’ve moved the latter to the
rear fan mount to act as an extra exhaust.PSU
Corsair CX550M
£62 inc VAT
ebuyer.comThe Corsair CX550M power supply offers
plenty of power, even for a high-end
system. It's also quiet and, more importantly
for a mini-ITX PC, it has a semi-modular
cable system. The ability to disconnect
cables that you aren't going to use with
your setup is a massive advantage in
small cases, as they often have limited
options for stowing and routing cables.Alternatives
Unless you opt for a more powerful graphics
card, there’s no point in considering a
higher wattage than 550W for your PSU,
but if you want to replace the PSU cables
with braided or custom ones, you’ll need
to step up to a fully modular PSU. Corsair’s
RM550x is 80 Plus Gold-rated, as opposed
to the CX-series’ Bronze rating, and it’s
fully modular, so you can fit alternative
cables from Corsair, as well as from custom
cable creators such as CableMod.SSD
1TB Corsair MP600
£242 inc VAT
scan.co.ukYou need to use as few cables as possible
in your mini-ITX PC, so there’s a strong
argument for ditching both 3.5in hard disks
and 2.5in SSDs, as they each add two cables
to the mix. M.2 SSDs are the answer here, and
there’s a huge choice of speeds and capacities.
We’ve chosen Corsair’s 1TB MP600, as it’s
one of the fastest SSDs you can currently
buy, with sequential read and write speeds
nearly 5,000MB/sec and over 4,000MB/sec
respectively. That’s all thanks to its use of the
latest PCI-E 4 standard. With 1TB of storage,
there’s enough room for Windows, games
and a reasonable amount of other data too,
so you can potentially ditch all other drives.Alternatives
If you’re not fussed by PCI-E 4, then Corsair’s
MP510 is still a very fast PCI-E NVMe SSD,
but it costs over £100 less for a 960GB drive.
If you want a second M.2 SSD to act as a
data storage drive in place of a hard disk,
then a 1TB Crucial MX500 can be bought
for around £100 inc VAT. It’s limited to SATA
speeds, but that’s fine for secondary storage.SHOPPING LIST
TOTAL: £1,882INCVAT
nel. The cooler is more than up