Small Form Factor computer build — Part 5 ‘It *FITS* & works!‘ – Linux Newbie

Main parts arrived yesterday, which gave me the $11.74 WIN Pro OS, 120GB SSD (a spare), case, MB, CPU and memory to do the build…could wait on the 12.7mm ODD drive bay. Good thing I bought that USB DVD-ROM recently, because the drivers on the DVD were needed for display, various controllers, etc. The Asus MB driver DVD also provided Linux drivers, but will have to wait on that ODD drive bay before I install Linux on ‘InWin’ – new name for this computer, and I seem to end up naming my desktop builds by the case OEM’s. As you can imagine, it gets pretty tight on a 6.7” x 6.7” MB, but it seemed about the same as bigger boards, except if you needed to go back in and fix something – i.e. I hooked up pwr switch and a couple LED’s wrong which required pulling the memory out, disconnecting 24-pin pwr supply and disconnecting the USB wire.

Fixed the mistake, and it powered right up…super quite 150W power supply! Probably even quieter than the CPU fan. SATA cable needs to be long, and since I installed the SSD just temporarily (whilst I wait on the ODD drive bay) it barely made it to the temp spot for the SSD. You can install a couple SSD or 2.5” HDD’s, but I want to be able to swap out OS drives. About 1/8-3/16” space above CPU cooler fan after installation, so bigger fans than Intel stocks are out – am not sure about AMD Box CPUs.

I’ll be doing updates to this post before and after the 12.7mm ODD drive bay arrives…also do a final cost at some point, but it looks like this is going to be close:

$11.74 WIN10 Pro OEM
$71.68 InWin case
$74.89 16GB PNY memory
$15.29 12.7mm ODD drive bay
$92.99 H310I Mini-ITX MB
$136.25 i3-8100 3.6 GHz Quad processor

TOTAL = $402.84

Since the old Dell was removed that gave me a 3-port HDMI cable to use for ‘Rose’ and ‘InWin’ to share a 23-24” monitor … also removed a 128GB SSD from ‘Asus’ (old MB could only do SATA 1 & 2 so it was wasted there) which becomes a spare, and I installed the $11.74 WIN10 Pro OEM on a spare 120GB SSD – makes restoring backup images easier and cheaper than if using a 128GB which ‘usually’ cost more. 120GB SSDs can be had for less than $19, and as low as $16 if you look and wait. If you had to buy one for the build you could add that to the price. I will be installing Ubuntu to another SSD, so I will probably include that $19 to final costs…so about $423 for a great little machine. Less processor, less memory, no ODD drive bay and no Windows OS – with a $19 SSD would be around $271, which would be in the ‘Rose’ build range.

Here are some pics of it all fitting together: