January 24, 2023

Mjolnir

As much as I loved the beautiful machine, the passive cooling and form factor of the DB4 chassis had limitations. The best GPU I could fit in (and cool down), a 1050 Ti, barely managed to run Diablo 2 Resurrected. Playing could become unpleasant at 30fps in busy levels!

Despite its inadequacy as a gaming machine, I did not have the heart to scavenge the Streacom’s DB4 for parts. It is too gorgeous and has served us too well. Instead I built a new machine based on the most beautiful Small Form Factor I could find, Thor Zone’s Mjolnir.

Picking components

List of components:

• CPU         : Intel Core i5-11600
• RAM         : Corsair Vengeance LPX 64GiB DDR4 3600Mhz
• Motherboard : Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4
• Storage     : Samsung 980 Pro 2TiB M.2 NVMe
• GPU         : Nvidia 3060 Ti Founders Edition
• Chassis     : Mjolnir by Thor Zone
• CPU AIO     : CoolerMaster MasterLiquid ML120L
• PSU         : Corsair SF Series, SF750

As it would later turn out, a Noctua NF-A14 does not fit in a Mjolnir. Luckily, the thermal benchmarks showed this build does not need an extra fan. If you insist on adding one (for a core i9 maybe?), a NF-A12 should do.

Building it

The chassis comes pre-assembled. All