Quiet Mini-ITX Gaming Build Guide #3: BitFenix Prodigy Edition
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If you dropped by my basement lab six or seven years ago on a Friday night, you would have seen the Friday Night Follies LAN parties I host most weeks. Back then, you would have been impressed at just how warm the room was. The fast PC of that era were equipped with power-hungry graphics cards, and coupled with the occasional CRT monitor, generated a ton of heat.
We also had to crank up the speakers, not so much because we wanted lots of loud gunfire and explosions which we didbut because the PCs themselves were noisy. I then shut it down as soon as I could, because the noise level was astonishingly loud. In building my gaming PC--a truly modern machine--I wanted something relatively compact.
On the other hand, I want room to add additional storage, and the case needs to be big enough to bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build a high-end graphics card. And building in it was a little different than in a traditional ATX case. The motherboard sits horizontally inside the case, with room on either side for stray cabling and double-wide graphics cards. The case design assumes you want to build a fully realized PC, with lots of storage bays and room for a full size graphics card.
Several aspects of the Prodigy are worth critiquing. The power supply compartment is a little shallow, even if you have a square, small PSU. The main power cable needs to bend at an awkward angle. Bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build second problem is the hard drive bays. The bays are mostly tool-free, although the optical drive does need to be screwed into place. The bays are also reversible, which is actually pretty clever.
That allows you to easily slot in new storage into one of the five 3. And while you can install a 2. This little chore consists of removing 3, screws, rotating the bays, and screwing 3, screws back in. If you do reverse the bays, adding or changing 3. Bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build decided bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build mount all the front panel connectors — USB, power switch, etc.
There are three key things to note about this system. And the whole affair is pretty damned quiet, even under full gaming load. Not everyone will want to drop a cool grand on a graphics card. The caching SSD gives the standard hard drive a little oomph on load times and Windows boot speeds. But most of the cost is built into the storage and the graphics card, so you can save a bunch of hard earned bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build by just changing out those two components.
How did I actually build this PC? Bitfenix prodigy miniitx case build took a lot of tinkering. Working with small PCs, even in a case as capacious as the Prodigy, is an exercise in patience and determining the right order of installation.
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