# I Built the Ultimate 2.5 Liter SFF Workstation PC

**Creator:** Jeff Friesen
**Platform:** youtube
**Duration:** 18m
**Source:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8

## Summary

Jeff Friesen shares his journey of building a compact 2.5 L Mini ITX PC, a project that evolved from a month-long endeavor into a nine-month challenge. The final product not only meets his needs as a portable workstation but also outperforms his previous setups in both efficiency and performance.

- The build started as a solution to the inefficiencies of using separate desktops and underwhelming laptops for work.
- He chose the Velka 5 case for its ability to accommodate a full-size GPU while remaining portable.
- The PC features an efficient Ryzen 7900X CPU paired with the Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF GPU, optimizing performance per watt.
- The custom aluminum housing serves as a heat sink, enhancing thermal management.
- Extensive testing and modifications were required to ensure compatibility and stability, including troubleshooting BIOS and GPU recognition issues.
- Performance benchmarks show significant improvements over previous systems, with faster rebuild times in SolidWorks and lower power consumption.
- The total cost of the build was approximately $2,911, and he is considering a small manufacturing run for enthusiasts interested in similar builds.
- Jeff invites feedback and interest from viewers regarding potential kits for building similar PCs.

## Transcript

[[0:12]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=12s)
[Music] hello guys today I wanted to share with you how I built this Compact and 
powerful 2.5 L Mini itx  PC. It was way more work than I ever expected but 
what started as a one-month side project has taken me the better part of 9 months to finish.
I got  to say the result has really been worth all the effort. This is one of my favorite tools 
I've built for myself. I mean just look at how cool this tiny little guy is and you won't believe 
how well something this small benchmarks but we'll take a look at that in a bit. I'm considering 
doing a small manufacturing run for enthusiasts who want to use this custom case so stick around 
until the end if you want to hear more about how much a build like this costs and let me know 
in the comments if that's something that sounds interesting to you. First I should probably give 
you some context my name is Jeff Friesen and I am an electrical and mechanical design engineer. 
I live in Sacramento California but frequently travel to Stockholm Sweden for work where I'm the 
lead mechanical designer of an electric surf board for a startup called Lind Art and Technology. 
We'll be launching in just a few short months but there's still a ton of work ahead. Over 
the past 3 years I haven't been able to find my perfect solution for a portable workstation 
until now. I started out with separate desktops in California and Sweden but this just led to the 
annoyance of moving around solidworks licenses and making sure all my files were versioned correctly. 
Then I opted instead to use a small work laptop paired with an external GPU but the performance 
was pretty underwhelming. As someone who can be pretty chaotic during my creative process with 
rapidly evolving designs of complex Parts the rebuild times in solidworks get quite long. 
sometimes leading me to waste minutes every time a part needs to be rebuilt which can happen 
hundreds of times a day. Losing precious hours of my life waiting for a slower computer does not 
spark Joy. Additionally, I ran into a lot of driver glitches with the external GPU setup as it 
just wasn't very polished. After watching way too many YouTube videos on Mini ITX builds I stumbled 
across the velka 5 case and decided instead to make a build in this 5 L case capable of holding 
a fullsize GPU. With how many times I've lost my checked bag during travel I knew I wanted to keep 
the desktop in my backpack. This was one of the smallest cases that still fit a full-size GPU, and 
while physically possible to put in my backpack I got to say TSA was not terribly impressed with me 
lugging this 5 kg metal brick. I always managed to get through but on the 17-hour multi-leg flight 
getting hassled by security and having to forgo bringing a lot of other gadgets that no longer 
fit just wasn't ideal. That's when I saw the all new Nvidia RTX 4000 SFF Ada generation. An 
amazing graphics card with a terrible name. Its performance matches or exceeds my older full-size 
Quadro RTX 5000 card while drawing like a quarter of the power. I was already aware of the A2000 
which is mechanically identical to this new GPU but the improved performance and more importantly 
the 8 extra gigs of vram meant there was finally a small form factor GPU that met my requirements. 
It was then I knew I had to make my ultimate mini work station and I knew I wanted to go all in 
shaving as much volume and weight as possible.

[[2:58]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=178s)
So at the core of this build is the the efficient 
mini GPU and since we want to stay small keeping the thermal design power or TDP down is paramount. 
So the plan was to pair that with the ryzen 7900x which at the time was one of the highest 
ratings in performance per watt of desktop class processors, more on that later. This CPU runs 
efficiently around 100 to 130 Watts putting our total TDP for CPU and GPU at 200 watts. To avoid 
the need for an external power brick I was able to find this really awesome 250 W fanless design 
from hdplex that has been working great. Now, a well balanced individual that enjoys keeping 
their manufacturers warranties on their expensive PC components would have taken them and found one 
of the existing 3 and a half to four lit cases and that would be that lucky for us I'm a little more 
unhinged than that so I spent every spare moment of the next month ordering disassembling and 
measuring these components and CADing and playing twister with them to pack them as tight and small 
as I could. Also lucky for us I didn't record any of this so I'll save us the boredom of watching 
CAD and just show you the finished model here. So I decided I wanted to for an Ultra Premium Vibe 
and Mill the entire housing from a single block of aluminum since aluminum is such a great thermal 
conductor we can use the housing itself as a heat path out of the case I also opted to remove the 
power supply circuitry from its fanless metal housing and instead used its thermal pads to make 
direct contact with the PC case I used this small right angle pciu Riser from Amazon to tilt the 
GPU and removed its fan trout in case instead building the air flow path into the case itself 
I found that the gpu's small blower fan moved a surprising amount of air for its size with good 
static pressure and a nice sound profile under load also I think it just looks clean I figured 
that if one fan was enough for a 75 WT GPU then two more should do the trick for 130 watt CPU I 
found a really nice and cheap copper CPU Cooler with a vapor chamber to spread Heat across 
its fins that was designed for servers and I custom designed a 3D printed shroud to move air 
through it using these mini fans since I wasn't interested in having those insanely loud 40 mm 
server fans running in my office so first things first uh quoting this part on JL PCB showed it was 
going to be around $300 in Machining so I wanted to be confident things were going to fit luckily I 
have a few really nice resin and fdm machines here at my home office and I was able to use those to 
confirm here you can see me cleaning and prepping a final resin print for my piol Phenom Prime the 
lid got a bit warped but the body print itself showed the fitment were looking really promising 
this was the third version I printed and I decided it was finally good enough to order the machine 
parts in between this cut is about a six-month Gap where I had to shove this side project to focus 
on my actual job and maybe a personal life and I'm still wondering how many hours of my life I 
lost leaving these awesome components collecting dust while I used my old computer to get through 
the mountain of cat I had on my plate well you might notice that I ended up swapping out the 
CPU for the newer and more efficient ryzen 9900x and I vowed I needed to get this build together 
before any newer and fancier things made my build obsolete so it was time to press forward and while 
we waited for the machine components to arrive we started testing assembling and modding all of the 
internal components here we can see I printed off the fan trout in Black pet G using silver pla as 
the support material on my new pra XL this print came out nicely and I got a snug fit with the heat 
SN fan and lid The Next Step was to break out the mini four pin jst pH connectors on the two fans in 
the fan trout and reverse engineer the breakout so we could solder up an adapter using my current 
limiting power supply and a bit of deductive reasoning first we sorted out which wires were 
powering ground and then by tapping the yellow wire to the ground when it was powered on we 
observed this stopped the fan spinning so this was likely the pwm wire, leaving the final white wire 
as the rpm sense wire. Next up was trimming down this metal piece on the MSI B650i motherboard. 
The included rear face plate and aluminum shroud for the rear IO would have made the build 
significantly thicker so I machined individual IO holes into the case itself and used this angle 
grinder to do some light trimming of this piece.

[[6:47]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=407s)
My  garage might be a total disaster but the cut 
came out what we like to call "good enough". I do want to note here even a hacksaw would get 
the job done, but this was faster. We then reinstalled it onto the motherboard making 
sure the thermal pads were back in place. Next up we installed the hard drive and CPU into 
the motherboard. We also installed the RAM which I forgot to film, and then it was time to install 
the fan shroud and heat sink onto the CPU. I used these carbon cooling pads from Thermal Grizzly 
and because they can be easily reused and don't require cleaning and re-application like thermal 
paste I saved myself a ton of time since I had to uninstall this heat sink several times as I 
figured out the wiring and debugged the build.

[[7:24]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=444s)
Around this time the Machined housing arrived 
in the mail and as you can probably tell from this sped up clip I couldn't have been more 
excited. Everything was fitting great and the anodized and bead blasted surface finish 
was looking so clean so it was finally time to start installing everything 
into the case. First up was the 250 W power supply. We needed to be extra careful 
on this piece getting all the thermal pads installed and making sure none of the mains 
voltage was able to make contact with the housing. We used the pads and shielding from the 
original PSU case alongside some kapton tape to be extra safe. We screwed the five small screws 
it came with to hold it securely. Next we install a small 40x40x10 mm fan to get some small amount 
of passive air moving inside the case and screw in four screws at the corner. Then it was time 
to install the assembled motherboard and screw it into the tapped M3 holes. I also secured a 
small thermal pad to pull some heat out of the motherboard though this addition is likely 
unneeded. We got everything secured nicely and then installed the included short cable 
for the larger PSU connector that fits snugly with a bit of massaging. Next we installed the C6 
Mains connector that was included with the PSU.

[[8:26]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=506s)
Off  camera we removed the bulky intermediate 
connector and soldered the cable to appropriate length so it could be tucked nicely next to the 
sawed heat sink. two M2.5 screws hold the C6 connector snugly. The 8 Pin CPU power cable proved 
a little trickier to route and we had to remove the fan shroud and Tuck its wires down below the 
external air path here to get the routing right. We held it in place with some kapton tape and 
reinstalled the fan shroud and heatsink. Next up it was time to install the power switch. This 
was a small Easter egg I added to the build as the power switch is an RGB momentary switch that 
was made for stormcore motor controllers back when I worked with the sadly now at a business 
E-skate company lacroix. We use jumper wires and kapton tape alongside referencing the motherboard 
documentation to get this wired up which required to yet again uninstall and reinstall the fan 
shroud and heatsink to access the connector.

[[9:12]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=552s)
In hindsight I am not sure why I didn't just leave 
this fan shroud and heatsink uninstalled until the end. Unfortunately I ended up with some camera 
troubles here and so we are missing the footage of the housing removal of the GPU including 
installing a custom 3D printed component I made to hold the fan and direct airflow. This isn't 
really meant to be an instructional video anyway, but rather an overview of the steps so 
I'll quickly explain what  this entails.

[[9:34]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=574s)
First the stock housing and fan shroud 
was unscrewed from the GPU the fan was unplugged and then instead mounted to a 3D 
printed PETG bracket with a similar shape but which conformed to the machined housing. This 
was then secured to the GPU with two 20mm M2 screws and the fan was plugged back into the 
GPU. Then the GPU was plugged into a small right angle PCIE riser. This assembly is what 
you see me holding at the start of this next section and from here this is inserted into 
the motherboard ensuring the riser makes it into the PCIE connector on the motherboard. With 
a bit more massaging wires and some more kapton tape for good measure it was finally time to 
close this thing up and power it on for the first time. To say I was nervous would be a huge 
understatement, when the fans fired up for the first time I was so pumped and I couldn't wait 
to test it out, but alas, my hopes were quickly dashed when I realized it was not posting and 
I couldn't even get the BIOS to boot. I was so worried I had somehow damaged my CPU or GPU. 
After a late night debugging and a very brief and restless night's sleep I found there were three 
separate things holding me back  from success.

[[10:33]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=633s)
Firstly I needed to update the BIOS as the 
ram was being very finicky and not working at all. This finally let me boot and install 
Windows but the GPU was not recognized at all. The second and more time consuming fix was 
realizing that one of the pins in my GPU riser had gotten bent, so the GPU was not being seen 
by the computer. Even after I repaired this bent pin the GPU was seen but randomly crashing when 
I would increase the PCIE bus speeds over 2.0.

[[10:58]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=658s)
After a lot more assembly and disassembly 
I realized that the soldering of the pcie connector on the Riser was extremely shoddy 
and so after reflowing all 80 something of its pins by hand and adding some better quality 
solder I finally got it working reliably without crashing and it's been extremely stable 
even at pcie 4.0 speeds. Problem solved. Once things started working I could already tell 
that this machine was pretty excellent but it was then time to get all my software set up and 
installed and do some benchmarking to compare the build and make sure everything was working 
nicely for this comparison I wanted to stack it up against both my small 14-in AMD laptop as 
well as my previous small form factor 5.3 L build I also found some specs for a top- ofthe 
line 17-inch modern gaming laptop to compare though it should be noted that gaming class video 
cards aren't great when it comes to solarworks workloads especially with regard to stability so 
I don't really see this as a super viable option additionally the laptops with Quadro cards just 
don't really impress me with their performance or price and it was difficult to track down 
benchmarks online for those so I'm leaving them out of the the comparison obviously 
these aren't apples to apples comparisons as my older laptop and desktop are using OU ofd 
components and laptops also include a built-in display and keyboard and trackpad but for my use 
case at an office where I always offer dedicated monitor anyways this isn't really relevant and 
the comparisons are just for fun first up to compare is the portability at less than half the 
volume of my previous desktop I found this build to be extremely easy to slip into my backpack 
and it left tons of room for spare devices for my camera and other stuff it blew my mind that it 
was so tiny I was able to fit it in my backpack in what I will call Landscape aspect ratio I 
weighed each of these PCS and was pleased to see this desktop class build with full metal housing 
weighing it at only 6 lb or 2.75 kilos it was 60% of the weight of my previous build a full 42 LB 
lighter or 2 kg it only weighed about 1 kilo or 2 lb more than my 14-in laptop if we compare it 
to the strict 17.3in scar with built-in 490 GPU it is almost a full kilogram or 2 lb lighter than 
this 17 monster and full and a full liter volume smaller next we'll take a look at The Thermals 
I took some thermal footage of the housing and we can see the heat from the PSU is transferring 
nicely into the housing and it's getting up just under the 50 Celsius range in some hot spots 
which should be just fine the CPU temps hover around 60 to 65c during light use with near silent 
fans my cheap deel meter reads around 42 to 45 DB like this and I find the fan noise to be very 
unobtrusive under more heavy loads the fans ramp up and it Peaks around 85 to 90 Celsius again 
depending on fan curves and the fan definitely make themselves Heard Around 50 to 52 DB but again 
very subjectively I find the noise to be very tolerable and not have any high pitched or sharp 
components I think the Nvidia or PNY Engineers did a great job designing this fan to have a mild 
sound profile unfortunately I don't have adequate equipment to really capture the sound properly 
to show you guys next up I wanted to analyze performance and efficiency I thought it'd be fun 
to do some head-to-head benchmarking and I plugged my desktops into a wall outlet power meter to get 
true ratings it should be noted I'm limiting the CPU power of the two desktops pretty heavily as 
I wanted to keep them as I use them in the real world with low TDP to maximize efficiency and 
reduce fan noise I don't find the extra 5 to 10% performance to be worth the trade-offs of extra 
heat in my office here are the cine bench results I got and we can see in this synthetic Benchmark 
the single and multi core scores are between 1.5 to two times as fast as my previous desktop all 
while using considerably less power the multi four CPU benchmarks for the 17-in monster laptop are 
only slightly faster and this is attributable to its four extra cores even though its single 
core speeds are 10% slower than our desktop variant CPU on the GPU side it was incredible to 
see this newer 75 watt mini GPU absolutely crush the larger but older 230 watt Quadro RTX 5000 
with almost double its score really amazing to see the gains that are being made here in the 
past few years we can see the scores of the 17in laptop 4090 are pretty impressive as well but 
these likely wouldn't translate into solid works well and really the GPU numbers are generally 
less important for solid works workloads since frame rate isn't a major concern and what really 
matters is simply having enough vram available and having stable drivers that never crash it was 
also so impressive during these benchmarks to see how much less wattage was being pulled from 
the wall compared to my last desktop generally somewhere between 50 to 75% of the wattage 
during the benchmarks and I have noticed my office staying significantly cooler since I 
switched over which is a nice added bonus for solid works the benchmarks available are fairly 
sketchy and inconsistent so I opted to time a full part rebuild I wasn't able to grab scores for the 
laptop since they did have solid works installed they didn't have solid works installed currently 
but my old desktop was building this complicated part in roughly 62 seconds while the newer lower 
power machine completed it in just 42 seconds while this roughly 1.5 times speed up may not 
seem like much when you are constantly waiting on these things all day the feel is just such a major 
Improvement and I was so happy to see this working on the machine for the past couple weeks has felt 
so Snappy and smooth um I'm over the moon lastly uh I made this plot to compare the cinebench 
metrics and I kind of weighted the GPU and CPU metrics and scaled them so they had about even 
weight and then I again scaled those by dividing by the volume weight cost and peak power draw
respectively. You can pause the video if you want to think harder about these numbers but I 
just wanted to highlight a couple of interesting points. Firstly, I was very surprised to see the 
performance per dollar between these examples come out with less than 10% variance across the 
builds I expected the hire in stuff to see a higher price per performance penalty second we 
can see this build is absolutely crushing in the performance per walk category though this is a 
very limited sample size and I'm sure something in the Ultrabook category might Crush here 
instead I was also very surprised to see the build right in line with the 17 inch monster laptop 
and performance even with its much lower GPU score.

[[16:52]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=1012s)
in cinebench. Next up before we wrap this video 
up, is a cost breakdown of all the components. You can pause the video here if you want to see 
what each component cost me. The total came out to around $2,911 and I would easily pay that again 
for this awesome little machine. If you made it this far in the video thanks so much for watching 
and I would super appreciate any likes, subscribes, comments, you know the drill. It's always nice 
to get that positive feedback and engagement from you guys. My final thing I would ask is if this is 
something you'd be interested in building yourself?

[[17:24]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=1044s)
I have been thinking about maybe ordering a run 
of 20 cases and maybe selling them in some form of kit with the included custom printed bits and 
screws for I don't know $500-$1000 depending on what was included (the PSU and motherboard for 
instance). I should note that the quadro A2000 mini GPU is also compatible with this housing 
so it's possible to put together a more budget friendly build by saving around $750 there, and 
also saving maybe another 200 bucks on a lower-tier CPU like a ryzen 7700 or something like that 
and that puts the build closer to the $2,000 range if that's you know where your budget is sitting 
as as you can probably tell from this video, it's a higher skill level build, but I have a hunch there 
might be a few people out there who' want to give it a go. Let me know what you guys think down in 
the comments. If I get enough people expressing interest I might put together a more thorough 
build instruction video and front the money for a small run. Thank you so much for watching.
It has been an absolute delight to share this thing I made with you and I'm looking forward to building 
a lot more cool stuff to show on this channel.

[[18:28]](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTeBr0hBsn8&t=1108s)
yeah so *falls* oh God glad I got that on video