epgu has turned out to be pretty shitty, especially if you return the signal back to the laptop.
I would guess he is traveling with a monitor if he is building a desktop soâŚ
Most eGPU enclosures are 7+ liters, so It wouldnât really make sense.
On a side note I had a Dan A4 SFX and a Reference AMD RX480 that did not throttle in the case.
Yeah but when you travel you usually take a laptop to so its saving that space no?
more concerned on CPU side usually gpu has access to fresh air and has its normal cooler size, cpu usually gets screwed in SFF
Flower and top-down coolers work quite well in those cases, a stock 2600 will have no probs.
yeah but go much above that and you not gonna have a good time, so unless die shrinks drop power your kind of building your only rig in there. I dont see cooling tech getting any better anytime soon. I would go a bit bigger, but its up to OP. Done with my semi derail but still on topic conversation.
Ok, so my motivations for doing this is three fold. The first is to save space on my desktop. The reason for a full tower today is pretty much bust, with optical media being relegated to a very, very niche segment and 2.5" drives and even m.2 drives being the new normal, so itâs a fun little experiment to see how small I can get it. Heck, it could even be a thing to buy Optane in the future and buy a MicroATX with four RAM slots, and then use two memory slots for RAM and the other two for storage. Costs too much right now though.
The second is to explore the Linux-as-an-esport device. I see quite a few advantages to having say a locked down Windows virtual machine running on a no-nonsense-allowed Linux box. Having official tournaments on such machines would, in theory, eliminate a lot of the cheating in such events, especially if you have a paid technician going through logs afterwards for the VM.
But even for native games, Linux could in theory bring a lot to the table, since it is at the same time the most open and most controlled environment you can get. So, it would be cool to attend a mayor e-sports event with a desktop rig and show the power of Linux. Not looking to seriously compete or anything, way too bad at games nowadays to compete, but I do want to spread the word about gaming on Linux, and doing it with a sleek no-nonsense SFF to get the kids looking twice could be one good way to do it.
The third reason is to be able to say goodbye to Windows more or less permanently. I never had much trust in that OS to begin with and Windows 8 and 10 completely shattered my trust in Redmonds ability to create a good OS. While Linux desktop offerings also currently are lackluster, at least with Linux I can always hack a decent desktop experience - In Windows this becomes more and more of a problem.
As for your question, yes, I am willing to explore larger cases as well, and I could consider anything up to the Fractal Node 304. I do not wish to go with a water cooling solution since those require more maintenance than I want to perform.
Location wise I would like to have a rather low PC so I could do this:
+------------+ +------------+
| | | |
| Screen 1 | | Screen 2 |
+----+--+--+-+-+-+--+--+----+
| | | P C | | |
-+--+- +-----+ -+--+-
Picture not entirely to scale, but you get the idea - two screens with the PC snugly fit in-between. Therefore a height of max 200mm would be ideal - and the LZ7 is 198mm, but I also found the Silverstone SG1 which is 181mm in height. Bigger but still small with room for a 267mm length GPU (assuming top loading connector).
Performance wise, I could take a 580 or Vega with that case as well, which is a plus of course - Though Vega is a bit too pricey ATM. Thank you all for the case suggestions, keep the discussion going!
Swing by the SFF Forums if youâre looking for more SFF-specific feedback. For enclosures, Iâm a fan of NFCâs stuff - the Skyreach 4 Mini is 5.0L and there are BOMs and lots of build videos as well. Reading through the SFF Forums (or watching some of those build videos) I think will give you a much better idea of what your SFF options are. (There are many prebuilt solutions that can get you way smaller on the volume scale - the Hades Canyon NUC has an Intel Kaby Lake with a âVegaâ (HBM2 Polaris really) w/ 1050ti/1060 maxQ GPU performance in a 1.2L volume. In general, the DeskMini GTX seems to be kicking butt on the PPL (Performance Per Liter) front.
For really SFF builds, HDPLEX power supplies are what you want to look at - there is the 400 DC-ATX that connects to an external AC power brick, or the AC-DCs that are much smaller than traditional SFX or FlexATX power supplies. HDPLEX has some realy sexy fanless cases as well (although not so good for gaming).
While the pass-through possibilities are interesting, If youâre going for a dGPU, personally, Iâd skip the Raven Ridge APU - itâs been nothing but trouble on Linux for me (maybe others have solved the various lockup/hangs/black screens)⌠Something youâd need to weigh the pros and cons on I suppose.
For motherboards, you wonât need an X370 or X470 btw - the only real advantages are SLI/potentially more PCIe lanes, none of which youâll use on a mini-ITX board w/ 1 PCIe slot. BTW, if youâre looking at boards, you might want to skim through AHOCâs board overview - there are a bunch of pro/cons if youâre planning on doing any overclocking/major tweaking (BIOS and VRMs caveats basically). If not you can probably ignore that stuff.
If youâre going SFF, personally, Iâd go with an M.2 NVMe boot disk - 128GB disks are dirt cheap now ($30-40) and even the cheapest ones should still handily beat SATA performance.
BTW, I wouldnât dismiss Nvidia cards out of hand. Despite the closed binaries, the Nvidia cards recently have tended to be better priced, use less power, have more form factor options, and perform better in Linux (if you donât need Wayland support)⌠Donât get me wrong, I like to root for the underdog and love what AMD try to do w/ their open source drivers, but I was running a Vega 64 on my main workstation and now I run a 1080Ti and honestly itâs given me less trouble and works better. ÂŻ\_(ă)_/ÂŻ (Itâs worth noting that Intel has been doing open source GPU drivers for much longer, and much better, but obviously, that doesnât make it magically better.)
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But why.
Have you thought about using an Asrock X470 ITX and using PCI-E bifurcation? That way, you can guarantee you can get a host GPU that works while having the ability to go up to a Ryzen 7 2700 with itâs 8 cores.
Since youâre thinking the LZ7 already, custom laser cut your own case so that it fits both the host and passthrough GPUs. A RX 550 Host and a GTX 1070 Guest would be pretty good, assuming you could find a half height RX 550. MSI fortunately makes both a half height RX 550 and a ITX sized GTX 1070.
Rather than PCIe bifurcation, most boards also have a mPCIe (E-key) slot for a wifi adapter that can be cheaply adapted into a PCIe 1X riser (or thanks to mining, PCIe 1X risers w/ a full-size physical connection) which would be an option for multiple GPUs as well. That also might be a good excuse to try out an Innodisk EMPV-1201 but at this point, weâre getting to a cost/complexity level thatâs probably way out of scope for someoneâs whoâs not down the rabbit hole already.
@wertigonâs budget is $1000-1300, so if heâs looking for something easy, the DeskMini GTX/RX 1060 is $750 bare bones (reviewed by Wendell here). Hades Canyon NUCs start bare bones at $740 and $975 on SimplyNUC. There are a couple other options like the Zotac ZBOX E Series (including a Ryzen 5/1060 version) - the advantage of the Intel CPUs is that they all have well supported iGPUs that work OOTB (although youâd have to double-check what connectors physically hooks up where if youâre trying to pass-through signals).
BTW, Iâve had a Hades Canyon on my desk since release - I run it as a headless server b/c the Linux driver support was again, trash on release (this was the same for Vega and for Raven Ridge) - honestly, youâll need kernel 4.18 (and Mesa 18.2) for any hope for gfx to work - it also runs loud and hot and the power brick is massive and itâs surprisingly dense so I donât necessarily recommend it for most people, although it is teeny-tiny and you could easily commute/travel with it. Of course, you could also buy/shuck a low-end gaming laptop and end up with something smaller/lighterâŚ
It wonât really help you on the technical side but just as an alternative for the case, take a look at my handbag:
Quite a few good points raised, Iâll see if I can address them:
Allright, will look into it a bit more. I also have access to a 3D printer and perhaps even a mechanical design engineer, which means a custom case is not outside of my reach. I will need to do some further research, looks like the LZ7 is a bit too cramped for my needs. The Ghost looks much more promising in that case, but might end up with a budget case like the Silverstone SG13 in order to fit beefier components in there.
Yeah, this is the most interesting part. Part of me wants to know, how bad is this and will it be resolved in the near future? I have no problem upgrading kernels and such, and it does seem like the Raven Ridge issues for the 2400G has been resolved, albeit requiring Mesa 18.2+ and Kernel 4.17+. My actual purchase is a couple of months off, as well, so I can afford to wait for say Ubuntu 18.10.
Yeah, the M.2 disk seems like a solid choice and the only thing faster would be Optane - which costs a fortune and probably requires an Intel motherboard at this point, if itâs even supported by current desktop chipsets.
This is true. Wayland is appealing since the xOrg protocol allows any application to keylog any mouse and keyboard input, and thus a switchover is important - but on the other hand, many games still refuse to support Wayland and worse, create exclusive support for xOrg by using the xOrg API directly. So for a gaming system Wayland might not be optimal right now. This will of course get better and better, butâŚ
Another thing to consider is the power draw - Power is cheap but not free, and I will probably build two more of these rigs eventually for two more family members.
Yes, lots to think about for sure. Thanks for the input, will consider it!
Because I like to game, but I love to geek out in Linux! 
Hmmm, interesting idea, will look into it. Thanks for the suggestion!