ATX mobo in a microATX case

Lee H

Hi

Is there any danger or massive performance loss if you put an ATX motherboard in a microATX case, this PC will have quad core CPU with standard heatsink, Radeon 3870x2, 4 gig memory, SATA drive, 420W generic PSU

Will there be enough airflow to properly cool down this PC, my recommendation was to send it back and buy a standard ATX case with a branded 500W+ PSU, something else which has been highly recommended on this site is a decent heat sink would also reduce the cpu temp considerably

Any opinions on this would be great

Lee H

gorebrush

Question you should really be asking is...

"Will it fit"

Let alone performance.

The actual speed of the machine will not be affected, but you aren't doing airflow any favours.

But, as I say, it probably wont fit (The M/B will be too large)

astorrs

Size does matter after all.

An ATX mobo in a microATX case isn't going to fit without sawing off 1/3 of the board.

Performance is a not issue in a properly designed case. My ESX boxes are Q9550, 8GB RAM and dual 7200 rpm drives on an Intel microATX board. Works fine, but the case was designed for silence and efficient airflow. I don't have a high end graphics card (ESX is console based after all) so that would increase your heat requirements and you might want to look at a PCI slot blower or some other additional way to get the heat out of the case that modern GPUs can create.

gorebrush

astorrs wrote:

Size does matter after all.

An ATX mobo in a microATX case isn't going to fit without sawing off 1/3 of the board.

Performance is a not issue in a properly designed case. My ESX boxes are Q9550, 8GB RAM and dual 7200 rpm drives on an Intel microATX board. Works fine, but the case was designed for silence and efficient airflow. I don't have a high end graphics card (ESX is console based after all) so that would increase your heat requirements and you might want to look at a PCI slot blower or some other additional way to get the heat out of the case that modern GPUs can create.

Interesting.

How well does ESX run on these?

I'm considering building up some VM boxes myself.. and I'm thinking a similar spec to these.

arwes

Yeah I would imagine there's no way the standoffs on a microATX mobo tray are going to match up with the mounts on a ATX board.

As far as heat sinks go, I love my Tuniq Tower but it definitely requires a decent sized case, at least width wise.

astorrs

gorebrush wrote:

Interesting.

How well does ESX run on these?

I'm considering building up some VM boxes myself.. and I'm thinking a similar spec to these.

Works fine. I'm not exactly doing performance testing, but I can get about 5-10 VMs running comfortably enough on a box (depending on what they're doing - disk I/O's are the killer here, but you could always up it to 4 disk RAID-10 or something to improve things). CPU sits below 50% usually, and memory is close to max, but memory overcommit, TPS and the balloon driver in ESX help a lot - just make sure your VMs share a common O/S if possible (at least on each host) and then TPS can really make a difference.

Most of the time I just use local storage (you could always add another box with Open Filer or FreeNAS, etc) and for the times when I want to test something that requires shared storage I either use XVS to share the local storage between the two hosts, or I throw up a VM running either the NetApp, EMC Celerra or LeftHand simulators and use that as storage.

And most importantly, my wife doesn't mind them since they're hidden out of the way and basically silent when running.