The Ultimate Mini ITX Gaming PC 2021: A Comprehensive Review

In this article, we will delve into the world of mini ITX gaming PCs and explore one of the most impressive builds to date. The Ultimate Mini ITX Gaming PC 2021 is a marvel of engineering, boasting an array of cutting-edge components that make it perfect for enthusiasts and pros alike.

Getting a Decent Frame Rate

One of the most crucial aspects of any gaming PC is its ability to deliver smooth frame rates. In this build, we're looking at a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, which is capable of delivering impressive performance even in ray tracing mode. However, when enabled, things get a bit tricky. "If you do want to play with ray tracing though this is where things get a little bit tricky i'm going to set it to ultra here and i am going to enable dlss or at least change dlss from quality to balanced and even doing this you can see that we're just not really able to get what i've described as a properly playable frame rate really yes console users have had 30 fps for ages but on pc you don't need this so anyway really between about 35 and maybe 45 fps is doable if you don't want to play at 1440p 16x9 though then actually there's not really too much to complain about again it's not the highest frame rate in the world with around about 45 maybe 50 fps but you're not getting those extreme lows that you saw at 3 40 by 1440 so all in all if you do want to play with ray tracing at 1440p it is definitely doable but i think the best thing about this system bar it's gaming performance has to be the thermals and acoustics this is just working wonders"

The Build Process

One of the standout features of this build is its exceptional form factor. The mini ITX design allows for a compact and sleek appearance, making it perfect for those who want to keep their rig hidden from view. "This is just working wonders i mean if we look at the top we're getting around about 67 degrees on both the gpu and the cpu i think that's incredible bearing in mind that that 3060 ti is working pretty much flat out at the moment even though we've got that front mounted radiator sucking hot air and giving it to the graphics card it's able to deal with it really well honestly i'm really impressed with not only the form factor but the thermals and if i give you a little sample the acoustics this is my best angle planet zoo is actually a game that is quite intense on the cpu and you'll find that if you do have something that isn't really up to snuff you get a lot of stutter and you will find that your frame rate does get quite limited no issues here with this lovely 8 core 11 700k but if you're looking to save a bit of money and look at something maybe like the 11 400 and then pair it with something like a 3060 ti or a 3070 this is a game where you might see it start to struggle"

Forza Horizon 4 and Beyond

The build's performance doesn't just stop at gaming. Forza Horizon 4, which we've been playing every Saturday morning, shows off the PC's capabilities in a different light. With frame rates ranging from 115 to 130 FPS, this mini ITX gaming PC proves itself to be more than capable of handling high-end games at 1440p and beyond. "and you can see absolutely no problem whatsoever for a 30-60 ti anywhere between 115 and 130 frames a second so you're not only able to take advantage of high resolution but higher frame rates too which leaves us then with the final game that i'm playing at the moment valorum something that i'm expecting very high frame rates from oh and it's definitely worth noting you can't actually use this game or i think overwatch in ultrawide mode you have to have black bars on either side which is annoying"

The Verdict

Overall, the Ultimate Mini ITX Gaming PC 2021 is an incredible achievement in mini ITX design. With its impressive thermals and acoustics, it's perfect for those who want a compact and powerful gaming rig. While performance may not be as high as some of its larger counterparts, this build proves itself to be more than capable of handling demanding games at 1440p and beyond.

Affiliate Links

For those interested in building their own mini ITX gaming PC, we've included affiliate links to all the components used in this build. By using these links, you'll not only support our channel but also receive discounts on your purchase.

Amazon Affiliate Links:

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Gamer's Outreach

As a special thank you to our viewers, Gamer's Outreach is offering a 20% discount on their range of PC gaming peripherals. Use the code "PCBUILD20" at checkout to redeem your discount.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Ultimate Mini ITX Gaming PC 2021 is an exceptional build that proves itself to be more than capable of handling demanding games and applications. With its impressive thermals and acoustics, it's perfect for those who want a compact and powerful gaming rig. Whether you're a seasoned pro or just starting out, this mini ITX gaming PC is definitely worth considering.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enor we might be all right actually just about hey it works our completed mini itx system all ready to go this video is sponsored by maze for your chance to win 20 000 to create your ultimate pc gaming setup and support gamers outreach which is a brilliant cause go to amaze.com pccentric itx build time hooray it's actually been a while since i put one of these together but we've got a very special case in this is the meshlicious something that the whole of youtube is actually talking about well say the whole of youtube it's the whole of the itx pc gaming community which obviously is everybody right in this video as always we're going to go through all of the parts that we're using here today we'll explain why they're in the build talk about some of the pros and cons we'll give you the full build process so you know exactly how easy or difficult it might be to build in such a small itx chassis and then of course give you those all-important gameplay benchmark numbers so you know exactly how this thing performs and whether it's any good we will kick off today's build with a box i can actually throw without risk of dropping it this is a very small z590i itx motherboard it's from asus it's very feature packed as we've discussed on the channel before not really a huge fan of z590 just because you're paying an awful lot of money to get features that a lot of people won't necessarily use if you're doing it just for overclocking to be honest it's not really worth it i'd actually recommend that you get the b560 version of this motherboard definitely worth considering just bear in mind that this one is actually quite expensive rather comically and i guess continuing our theme of products i don't really recommend we have this the 11700k and to be clear this is a fantastic gaming cpu i think it offers much better price to performance than the i9 that's not really worth buying to be honest this has come down in price a lot since it actually came out only a few weeks ago and i imagine that trend will continue but the one that i would buy would be the plain old 11700 it costs around about 70 pounds less it's going to give you more or less the same performance if you're not looking to overclock there's not that much oc headroom in this anyway and if you pair it with a b560 version of this board all in you could save yourself between 150 maybe even 200 pounds it's time for me to be a cow and move on and talk about the vengeance rgb pro sl this is from corsair it is brand stinking new i'd always recommend that you grab 16 gigabytes of ram but to be fair in an itx case when you can't upgrade it very easily because you've only got two slots on the motherboard it might actually make sense to grab 32 if you can afford it from the off i'm not entirely sure what sl stands for maybe it's sleek maybe it's slap dash but i've used this before and it's fine the storage we've got the s50 lite from xpg and i really like this one not because it's the absolute fastest out there on the country it's pretty much an entry-level gen 4 ssd but you're not paying crazy prices for crazy speeds that you can't really use at the moment for now if you go for something a little bit cheaper you can get a higher capacity which ultimately is probably going to be more useful than speeds that you can't really tap into which now means we can move on to the most exciting part of any graphics card i've done it again it's the second time i've filmed that the most exciting part of any gaming pc is the graphics card this is the rtx 3060 ti and the reason that this is my favorite is because it offers pretty much the perfect priced performance if you're looking for a high-end gaming pc but it is important to note that in a case this small i wouldn't really recommend going for one of the fans edition cards just because they sort of end up blowing into nothing as far as the power supply is concerned this is from cooler master it is their v650 sfx gold you can actually fit a full size atx inside this chassis but i wouldn't really recommend it unless you're trying to reuse one that you already have just because it gives you some clearance issues you can't fit quite as much hardware inside this but if you're going for a 3080 or up i'd say it's probably cutting it a bit too fine so getting a 750 or an 850 or up is definitely gonna be what i'd recommend which leaves us then with the final piece of the puzzle this is also from xpg it's the lavente 240. they're going for something that's really easy to install pretty much plug and play and if it really is as quiet as 35 decibels at max loads like it seems to indicate on the box then it would be a pretty good product so those were the parts now it's time for the build process how will it go will everything be a success will it all fit first time will it work will pccentric cry again find out after a short word from this video's sponsor this video is sponsored by the amazing people over at amaze who are giving you the chance to win a 20 000 gaming setup it's really quite hard to comprehend just what this would look like but i'd say that two rtx 3090s a 16 core ryzen processor and 128 gigabytes of ram would just be the beginning ultimately you'd be able to go nuts and pick the setup that's right for you best of all though this is all for an amazing cause as amaze actually runs these campaigns to raise money for some awesome charises this one is all about gamers outreach an amazing charity that helps hospitalized children get back to health with the help of video games when things are at their worst and it's easy to feel incredibly lonely video games can help inspire kids give life purpose and create environments for social interactions your donation can help ease the burdens of hospitalization by providing equipment technology and software that helps children cope with long-term treatment so for a chance to win twenty thousand dollars to build your dream pc gaming setup and of course help an amazing cause go to omaze.com pccentric step one as always is to grab your motherboard box and actually take it out and plate it on top if you have the bog standard version of this case like i do then you might find that the gen 3 riser cable sort of messes with your brand new graphics card the way around this is to either build on top of the motherboard which you'll usually have to do if you have a ryzen cpu or anything that doesn't have an igpu but because the i7 that we're using does worst case scenario we can actually just unclip the graphics card go straight into the integrated graphics and then change that setting in the motherboard without any real fuss but that's enough talk and enough faff let's actually start building this we'll open up our little cpu slot by pulling this lever the whole thing should then carefully lift up you can then grab your intel cpu line it up with the slot won't require any force lower it down and then the top should pop off why am i so shaky i couldn't do any filming like this it's not caffeine i'm just hungry i want my lunch it's just a roll today you don't get excited then you can open up your box of ram and yes i do have four sticks in here but obviously you wouldn't buy four sticks because you can only fit two in or love the smell of ram in the morning oh wait it's ten past one i'm lying to you again i'm sorry open up slots one and two which i think you can probably manage in this instance and then drop your ram into place haven't got my screwdriver that is uh poor planning you will need two one big one one small one we'll use the small one to access the ssd bay remove the protective film on both layers because you do actually get a little heat shield or a thermal pad on both sides which is nice then you can grab your ssd because the s50 actually has its own heatsink it doesn't fit in here properly it's fine but just be aware that if you are copying this it's not going to work flawlessly the next step believe it or not is to actually get your mounting hardware from your cpu cooler and see if you can fit this before you put it inside the chassis as it is a lot easier to do it outside of the case than inside so we can pick up the mounting plates we can push it through the back of the board then you can grab your four posts and just screw this into the motherboard huzzah which now means we can finally press on to the star of the show the mesh licious let's start by taking these panels apart and actually seeing what we've got under the hood the glass on the right just pops off very simply i assume the mesh does as well yes something that is definitely worth noting is that this is very thick mesh you've not got to worry about damaging this i mean it can definitely take a beating unsurprisingly this is a whole lot lighter now but there's still a lot of structure here you've not really got to worry about damaging it on the front there's usb 3 and type c inside your accessories box you've got what looks like an ssd mounting plates you've got a right angled displayport connection which is a little bit annoying because this is quite short i guess you're going to have to buy a bigger one if you want to well be quite far away from your pc looks like quite a lot of screws to me but i'm not going to argue when you're doing something like this i would highly advise that you get some sort of container to put them in otherwise they're just going to roll off and you will cry when you lose one and you'll say pc centric you are right all of this time why didn't i listen to you and frankly i will laugh in the face of your tears all because i'm an incredibly evil person and one that's now got a weapon don't mess with me it's like something out of minecraft fitting the radiator wasn't too bad but it was definitely quite tight you'll see that i've managed to get the tubes down the bottom which is definitely the best way to go the main thing really that you do need to bear in mind is that you can use a 240 or a 280 just make sure that you do put your fans facing the outside rather than the inside as there's going to be so many different cables that we haven't actually added in here yet that will almost certainly get caught and trust me you don't want that oh work sounds terrible whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa next up is the power supply and there is actually a little like rubber stopper that you do need to put down the bottom don't forget that that's going to stop the weight of the power supply sort of bending on its own just make sure that you do plug your cables in first as this makes it a whole lot easier than trying to do it once you've actually put this inside rubber stopper clearly doing its job but of course four screws will get this properly safe and secure it's starting to look more like a gaming pc at every moment so now it's time to actually drop in our motherboard itx is always pretty easy at this stage because it's just four screws and the good thing with this case is that you do actually get a pretty normal motherboard placement with all the rear i o actually at the back rather than facing up or down like you get on something like the h1 or the what is it the fantex evolve shift i like that case but it is quite annoying and indeed we do now have something that closely resembles our system you can see we have our motherboard power supply and then graphics card will come pretty much around here at the back and then you can just grab this pcie riser cable and then just clip that in now we can finish installing our cpu cooler very simple stuff just grab this little top plate spin it on and then spin it back gently line this up with the socket grab the big screws and then just fix down and you can see we have our lovely xpg logo i say lovely it's pretty standard isn't it it doesn't do anything for me but if you like xpg then you want to show it off the only thing that is starting to worry me is this little tube sticking out at the back i have a feeling that that is actually going to cause some clearance issues with this graphics card i mean to be fair if i do need to spin it around the other way it's not the end of the world i don't want to do too much cable management before i've checked because you will probably have to undo all of that in that instance which would be really annoying because you'd then have to redo it all again but here it is anyway the rtx 3060 gigabyte gaming oc originally sent out actually by gigabyte for some pre-rolls a while ago but i really liked this one because it's not the most expensive card out there it doesn't have that many well special features or frills but the performance and the calling is excellent for the money which in my eyes is pretty much the only reason to buy a graphics card so why spend extra on something that you just don't really need or we might be all right actually just about it's pretty cool with this case that you can actually lower different bits and pieces and move things around as you need them here i'm just lowering this all in one down a little bit just to move that bend out of the way if you were using a really small graphics card you can actually put it in this little top space here but obviously that's not going to happen we should just be able to click this into place yes there we go well designed i have to say i can see why this is getting so much praise because actually for something that is as small as this installation of everything has been really simple so far there is definitely a lot going for this there's there's very few compromises barring the space this may well have been easier to do before it actually uh slotted this in but i'll make do now for the rest of the cables and i'm hoping that this isn't too difficult but obviously as we have a glass window i want this to look okay but i don't think it's ever gonna look as pristine as it would in a normal chassis but i'm up for the challenge i guess the best strategy is to almost try and cover up as many cables as possible with this big power supply atx connector because there's not really any alternative that is actually pretty much everything plugged in and ready to go obviously we do need to put all of the side panels back on we need to do our final cable management runs but otherwise i think that is us pretty much ready to go and i think the thing that impresses me the most actually other than how easy it was to build is that there's still a lot of empty space in here which is obviously great for airflow don't get me wrong still need some work this is not neat but the point is it usually takes a lot of work to get it looking good because i think with this it actually shouldn't take too long at all so it's time to grab our little right angle connector that i mentioned earlier turns out this is actually a hdmi not a display port you can see the problem by not having a right angle connector there's definitely quite a lot there that would be sticking out so take this bit seriously you need the right angle get it the right angle you need the correct one and 90 degrees geometry jokes with pc centric get subs for more one meter cable really really remember of course we are actually expecting this not to work we'll probably get a black screen from where we've got that gen 3 riser cable with a gen 4 card but people in the comments have told me that this hasn't happened with them so i could be surprised look how useless that is you're so close to being perfect and you let yourself down here comes the moment of truth will we get anything to work please say yes well that's promising plenty of rgb some noise always good hey it works i honestly did not expect that i'm not sure whether it is a new thing or whether just asus boards in general work better than some others but we actually have a system that seems to be working huzzah what you will definitely need to do though is go into the search tab and type in pcie or pace at the moment it is set to automatic but you need to change this to gen 3. this is just to stop that whole confusion thing because even though it works to the bios the chances are as soon as you install any drivers or something it will get like confused and you get a black screen this is how to fix it here we are then our completed mini itx system all ready to go we've got windows loaded games installed i really love what we've got on offer here it is one heck of a system i absolutely love the way that it sits on your desk and doesn't take up much room but it's still very striking i think they've been really clever with a choice of materials because you've got mesh on all the bits that need it but then arguably the bit that you're actually going to look through the tempered glass isn't really going to sort of hinder your thermals much but having said that because the panels are interchangeable you can actually swap this out for mesh at a later date if you are finding that you're having problems kicking things off with some cyberpunk 2077 you can see that actually even at 3 40 by 1440 you're able to get a decent frame rate yes it's not a hundred frames a second but if you're looking to play this game without ray tracing then even on a monitor like this you're able to pretty much get the most out of it to be honest if you do want to play with ray tracing though this is where things get a little bit tricky i'm going to set it to ultra here and i am going to enable dlss or at least change dlss from quality to balanced and even doing this you can see that we're just not really able to get what i've described as a properly playable frame rate really yes console users have had 30 fps for ages but on pc you don't need this so anyway really between about 35 and maybe 45 fps is doable if you don't want to play at 1440p 16x9 though then actually there's not really too much to complain about again it's not the highest frame rate in the world with around about 45 maybe 50 fps but you're not getting those extreme lows that you saw at 3 40 by 1440 so all in all if you do want to play with ray tracing at 1440p it is definitely doable but i think the best thing about this system bar it's gaming performance has to be the thermals and acoustics this is just working wonders i mean if we look at the top we're getting around about 67 degrees on both the gpu and the cpu i think that's incredible bearing in mind that that 3060 ti is working pretty much flat out at the moment even though we've got that front mounted radiator sucking hot air and giving it to the graphics card it's able to deal with it really well honestly i'm really impressed with not only the form factor but the thermals and if i give you a little sample the acoustics this is my best angle planet zoo is actually a game that is quite intense on the cpu and you'll find that if you do have something that isn't really up to snuff you get a lot of stutter and you will find that your frame rate does get quite limited no issues here with this lovely 8 core 11 700k but if you're looking to save a bit of money and look at something maybe like the 11 400 and then pair it with something like a 3060 ti or a 3070 this is a game where you might see it start to struggle our next game on one that i promise i am still playing every saturday morning i sit down and i love it is some forza horizon 4. and you can see absolutely no problem whatsoever for a 30-60 ti anywhere between 115 and 130 frames a second so you're not only able to take advantage of high resolution but higher frame rates too which leaves us then with the final game that i'm playing at the moment valorum something that i'm expecting very high frame rates from oh and it's definitely worth noting you can't actually use this game or i think overwatch in ultrawide mode you have to have black bars on either side which is annoying now i'm not normally one to complain at 250 frames a second but for some reason in valerian we're not actually getting the proper utilization that we should be you are incredibly unlikely to run into the same issue i'm not sure what's going on here i'm sure i can fix it but clearly you can see that frame rate in something like this is not going to be a problem and so then this has been the ultimate mini itx gaming pc 2021 and all of the seo and keywords that i can possibly fit in there obviously you can go for something higher end than this to be honest if you're looking at doing that i'd probably recommend the 5900x personally i would actually do something very similar to this i'll just go for a b560 and then 11 700 f rather than the k version because in my opinion that's just wasted money i would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this one though do you agree with me that the build process and the overall unis and form factor is ridiculously slick or would you prefer that they had done something differently of course do get subscribed for more videos just like this and other builds that you can find in the end screen smash that like button if you've enjoyed it and of course you can check out all of the parts that were featured here including current pricing with my amazon affiliate links that are listed down below and of course while you're down there head over to amaze.com pccentric for your chance to win that twenty thousand dollar pc gaming setup and of course support gamers outreach thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next one youor we might be all right actually just about hey it works our completed mini itx system all ready to go this video is sponsored by maze for your chance to win 20 000 to create your ultimate pc gaming setup and support gamers outreach which is a brilliant cause go to amaze.com pccentric itx build time hooray it's actually been a while since i put one of these together but we've got a very special case in this is the meshlicious something that the whole of youtube is actually talking about well say the whole of youtube it's the whole of the itx pc gaming community which obviously is everybody right in this video as always we're going to go through all of the parts that we're using here today we'll explain why they're in the build talk about some of the pros and cons we'll give you the full build process so you know exactly how easy or difficult it might be to build in such a small itx chassis and then of course give you those all-important gameplay benchmark numbers so you know exactly how this thing performs and whether it's any good we will kick off today's build with a box i can actually throw without risk of dropping it this is a very small z590i itx motherboard it's from asus it's very feature packed as we've discussed on the channel before not really a huge fan of z590 just because you're paying an awful lot of money to get features that a lot of people won't necessarily use if you're doing it just for overclocking to be honest it's not really worth it i'd actually recommend that you get the b560 version of this motherboard definitely worth considering just bear in mind that this one is actually quite expensive rather comically and i guess continuing our theme of products i don't really recommend we have this the 11700k and to be clear this is a fantastic gaming cpu i think it offers much better price to performance than the i9 that's not really worth buying to be honest this has come down in price a lot since it actually came out only a few weeks ago and i imagine that trend will continue but the one that i would buy would be the plain old 11700 it costs around about 70 pounds less it's going to give you more or less the same performance if you're not looking to overclock there's not that much oc headroom in this anyway and if you pair it with a b560 version of this board all in you could save yourself between 150 maybe even 200 pounds it's time for me to be a cow and move on and talk about the vengeance rgb pro sl this is from corsair it is brand stinking new i'd always recommend that you grab 16 gigabytes of ram but to be fair in an itx case when you can't upgrade it very easily because you've only got two slots on the motherboard it might actually make sense to grab 32 if you can afford it from the off i'm not entirely sure what sl stands for maybe it's sleek maybe it's slap dash but i've used this before and it's fine the storage we've got the s50 lite from xpg and i really like this one not because it's the absolute fastest out there on the country it's pretty much an entry-level gen 4 ssd but you're not paying crazy prices for crazy speeds that you can't really use at the moment for now if you go for something a little bit cheaper you can get a higher capacity which ultimately is probably going to be more useful than speeds that you can't really tap into which now means we can move on to the most exciting part of any graphics card i've done it again it's the second time i've filmed that the most exciting part of any gaming pc is the graphics card this is the rtx 3060 ti and the reason that this is my favorite is because it offers pretty much the perfect priced performance if you're looking for a high-end gaming pc but it is important to note that in a case this small i wouldn't really recommend going for one of the fans edition cards just because they sort of end up blowing into nothing as far as the power supply is concerned this is from cooler master it is their v650 sfx gold you can actually fit a full size atx inside this chassis but i wouldn't really recommend it unless you're trying to reuse one that you already have just because it gives you some clearance issues you can't fit quite as much hardware inside this but if you're going for a 3080 or up i'd say it's probably cutting it a bit too fine so getting a 750 or an 850 or up is definitely gonna be what i'd recommend which leaves us then with the final piece of the puzzle this is also from xpg it's the lavente 240. they're going for something that's really easy to install pretty much plug and play and if it really is as quiet as 35 decibels at max loads like it seems to indicate on the box then it would be a pretty good product so those were the parts now it's time for the build process how will it go will everything be a success will it all fit first time will it work will pccentric cry again find out after a short word from this video's sponsor this video is sponsored by the amazing people over at amaze who are giving you the chance to win a 20 000 gaming setup it's really quite hard to comprehend just what this would look like but i'd say that two rtx 3090s a 16 core ryzen processor and 128 gigabytes of ram would just be the beginning ultimately you'd be able to go nuts and pick the setup that's right for you best of all though this is all for an amazing cause as amaze actually runs these campaigns to raise money for some awesome charises this one is all about gamers outreach an amazing charity that helps hospitalized children get back to health with the help of video games when things are at their worst and it's easy to feel incredibly lonely video games can help inspire kids give life purpose and create environments for social interactions your donation can help ease the burdens of hospitalization by providing equipment technology and software that helps children cope with long-term treatment so for a chance to win twenty thousand dollars to build your dream pc gaming setup and of course help an amazing cause go to omaze.com pccentric step one as always is to grab your motherboard box and actually take it out and plate it on top if you have the bog standard version of this case like i do then you might find that the gen 3 riser cable sort of messes with your brand new graphics card the way around this is to either build on top of the motherboard which you'll usually have to do if you have a ryzen cpu or anything that doesn't have an igpu but because the i7 that we're using does worst case scenario we can actually just unclip the graphics card go straight into the integrated graphics and then change that setting in the motherboard without any real fuss but that's enough talk and enough faff let's actually start building this we'll open up our little cpu slot by pulling this lever the whole thing should then carefully lift up you can then grab your intel cpu line it up with the slot won't require any force lower it down and then the top should pop off why am i so shaky i couldn't do any filming like this it's not caffeine i'm just hungry i want my lunch it's just a roll today you don't get excited then you can open up your box of ram and yes i do have four sticks in here but obviously you wouldn't buy four sticks because you can only fit two in or love the smell of ram in the morning oh wait it's ten past one i'm lying to you again i'm sorry open up slots one and two which i think you can probably manage in this instance and then drop your ram into place haven't got my screwdriver that is uh poor planning you will need two one big one one small one we'll use the small one to access the ssd bay remove the protective film on both layers because you do actually get a little heat shield or a thermal pad on both sides which is nice then you can grab your ssd because the s50 actually has its own heatsink it doesn't fit in here properly it's fine but just be aware that if you are copying this it's not going to work flawlessly the next step believe it or not is to actually get your mounting hardware from your cpu cooler and see if you can fit this before you put it inside the chassis as it is a lot easier to do it outside of the case than inside so we can pick up the mounting plates we can push it through the back of the board then you can grab your four posts and just screw this into the motherboard huzzah which now means we can finally press on to the star of the show the mesh licious let's start by taking these panels apart and actually seeing what we've got under the hood the glass on the right just pops off very simply i assume the mesh does as well yes something that is definitely worth noting is that this is very thick mesh you've not got to worry about damaging this i mean it can definitely take a beating unsurprisingly this is a whole lot lighter now but there's still a lot of structure here you've not really got to worry about damaging it on the front there's usb 3 and type c inside your accessories box you've got what looks like an ssd mounting plates you've got a right angled displayport connection which is a little bit annoying because this is quite short i guess you're going to have to buy a bigger one if you want to well be quite far away from your pc looks like quite a lot of screws to me but i'm not going to argue when you're doing something like this i would highly advise that you get some sort of container to put them in otherwise they're just going to roll off and you will cry when you lose one and you'll say pc centric you are right all of this time why didn't i listen to you and frankly i will laugh in the face of your tears all because i'm an incredibly evil person and one that's now got a weapon don't mess with me it's like something out of minecraft fitting the radiator wasn't too bad but it was definitely quite tight you'll see that i've managed to get the tubes down the bottom which is definitely the best way to go the main thing really that you do need to bear in mind is that you can use a 240 or a 280 just make sure that you do put your fans facing the outside rather than the inside as there's going to be so many different cables that we haven't actually added in here yet that will almost certainly get caught and trust me you don't want that oh work sounds terrible whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa next up is the power supply and there is actually a little like rubber stopper that you do need to put down the bottom don't forget that that's going to stop the weight of the power supply sort of bending on its own just make sure that you do plug your cables in first as this makes it a whole lot easier than trying to do it once you've actually put this inside rubber stopper clearly doing its job but of course four screws will get this properly safe and secure it's starting to look more like a gaming pc at every moment so now it's time to actually drop in our motherboard itx is always pretty easy at this stage because it's just four screws and the good thing with this case is that you do actually get a pretty normal motherboard placement with all the rear i o actually at the back rather than facing up or down like you get on something like the h1 or the what is it the fantex evolve shift i like that case but it is quite annoying and indeed we do now have something that closely resembles our system you can see we have our motherboard power supply and then graphics card will come pretty much around here at the back and then you can just grab this pcie riser cable and then just clip that in now we can finish installing our cpu cooler very simple stuff just grab this little top plate spin it on and then spin it back gently line this up with the socket grab the big screws and then just fix down and you can see we have our lovely xpg logo i say lovely it's pretty standard isn't it it doesn't do anything for me but if you like xpg then you want to show it off the only thing that is starting to worry me is this little tube sticking out at the back i have a feeling that that is actually going to cause some clearance issues with this graphics card i mean to be fair if i do need to spin it around the other way it's not the end of the world i don't want to do too much cable management before i've checked because you will probably have to undo all of that in that instance which would be really annoying because you'd then have to redo it all again but here it is anyway the rtx 3060 gigabyte gaming oc originally sent out actually by gigabyte for some pre-rolls a while ago but i really liked this one because it's not the most expensive card out there it doesn't have that many well special features or frills but the performance and the calling is excellent for the money which in my eyes is pretty much the only reason to buy a graphics card so why spend extra on something that you just don't really need or we might be all right actually just about it's pretty cool with this case that you can actually lower different bits and pieces and move things around as you need them here i'm just lowering this all in one down a little bit just to move that bend out of the way if you were using a really small graphics card you can actually put it in this little top space here but obviously that's not going to happen we should just be able to click this into place yes there we go well designed i have to say i can see why this is getting so much praise because actually for something that is as small as this installation of everything has been really simple so far there is definitely a lot going for this there's there's very few compromises barring the space this may well have been easier to do before it actually uh slotted this in but i'll make do now for the rest of the cables and i'm hoping that this isn't too difficult but obviously as we have a glass window i want this to look okay but i don't think it's ever gonna look as pristine as it would in a normal chassis but i'm up for the challenge i guess the best strategy is to almost try and cover up as many cables as possible with this big power supply atx connector because there's not really any alternative that is actually pretty much everything plugged in and ready to go obviously we do need to put all of the side panels back on we need to do our final cable management runs but otherwise i think that is us pretty much ready to go and i think the thing that impresses me the most actually other than how easy it was to build is that there's still a lot of empty space in here which is obviously great for airflow don't get me wrong still need some work this is not neat but the point is it usually takes a lot of work to get it looking good because i think with this it actually shouldn't take too long at all so it's time to grab our little right angle connector that i mentioned earlier turns out this is actually a hdmi not a display port you can see the problem by not having a right angle connector there's definitely quite a lot there that would be sticking out so take this bit seriously you need the right angle get it the right angle you need the correct one and 90 degrees geometry jokes with pc centric get subs for more one meter cable really really remember of course we are actually expecting this not to work we'll probably get a black screen from where we've got that gen 3 riser cable with a gen 4 card but people in the comments have told me that this hasn't happened with them so i could be surprised look how useless that is you're so close to being perfect and you let yourself down here comes the moment of truth will we get anything to work please say yes well that's promising plenty of rgb some noise always good hey it works i honestly did not expect that i'm not sure whether it is a new thing or whether just asus boards in general work better than some others but we actually have a system that seems to be working huzzah what you will definitely need to do though is go into the search tab and type in pcie or pace at the moment it is set to automatic but you need to change this to gen 3. this is just to stop that whole confusion thing because even though it works to the bios the chances are as soon as you install any drivers or something it will get like confused and you get a black screen this is how to fix it here we are then our completed mini itx system all ready to go we've got windows loaded games installed i really love what we've got on offer here it is one heck of a system i absolutely love the way that it sits on your desk and doesn't take up much room but it's still very striking i think they've been really clever with a choice of materials because you've got mesh on all the bits that need it but then arguably the bit that you're actually going to look through the tempered glass isn't really going to sort of hinder your thermals much but having said that because the panels are interchangeable you can actually swap this out for mesh at a later date if you are finding that you're having problems kicking things off with some cyberpunk 2077 you can see that actually even at 3 40 by 1440 you're able to get a decent frame rate yes it's not a hundred frames a second but if you're looking to play this game without ray tracing then even on a monitor like this you're able to pretty much get the most out of it to be honest if you do want to play with ray tracing though this is where things get a little bit tricky i'm going to set it to ultra here and i am going to enable dlss or at least change dlss from quality to balanced and even doing this you can see that we're just not really able to get what i've described as a properly playable frame rate really yes console users have had 30 fps for ages but on pc you don't need this so anyway really between about 35 and maybe 45 fps is doable if you don't want to play at 1440p 16x9 though then actually there's not really too much to complain about again it's not the highest frame rate in the world with around about 45 maybe 50 fps but you're not getting those extreme lows that you saw at 3 40 by 1440 so all in all if you do want to play with ray tracing at 1440p it is definitely doable but i think the best thing about this system bar it's gaming performance has to be the thermals and acoustics this is just working wonders i mean if we look at the top we're getting around about 67 degrees on both the gpu and the cpu i think that's incredible bearing in mind that that 3060 ti is working pretty much flat out at the moment even though we've got that front mounted radiator sucking hot air and giving it to the graphics card it's able to deal with it really well honestly i'm really impressed with not only the form factor but the thermals and if i give you a little sample the acoustics this is my best angle planet zoo is actually a game that is quite intense on the cpu and you'll find that if you do have something that isn't really up to snuff you get a lot of stutter and you will find that your frame rate does get quite limited no issues here with this lovely 8 core 11 700k but if you're looking to save a bit of money and look at something maybe like the 11 400 and then pair it with something like a 3060 ti or a 3070 this is a game where you might see it start to struggle our next game on one that i promise i am still playing every saturday morning i sit down and i love it is some forza horizon 4. and you can see absolutely no problem whatsoever for a 30-60 ti anywhere between 115 and 130 frames a second so you're not only able to take advantage of high resolution but higher frame rates too which leaves us then with the final game that i'm playing at the moment valorum something that i'm expecting very high frame rates from oh and it's definitely worth noting you can't actually use this game or i think overwatch in ultrawide mode you have to have black bars on either side which is annoying now i'm not normally one to complain at 250 frames a second but for some reason in valerian we're not actually getting the proper utilization that we should be you are incredibly unlikely to run into the same issue i'm not sure what's going on here i'm sure i can fix it but clearly you can see that frame rate in something like this is not going to be a problem and so then this has been the ultimate mini itx gaming pc 2021 and all of the seo and keywords that i can possibly fit in there obviously you can go for something higher end than this to be honest if you're looking at doing that i'd probably recommend the 5900x personally i would actually do something very similar to this i'll just go for a b560 and then 11 700 f rather than the k version because in my opinion that's just wasted money i would absolutely love to hear your thoughts on this one though do you agree with me that the build process and the overall unis and form factor is ridiculously slick or would you prefer that they had done something differently of course do get subscribed for more videos just like this and other builds that you can find in the end screen smash that like button if you've enjoyed it and of course you can check out all of the parts that were featured here including current pricing with my amazon affiliate links that are listed down below and of course while you're down there head over to amaze.com pccentric for your chance to win that twenty thousand dollar pc gaming setup and of course support gamers outreach thank you so much for watching i really appreciate it and i will catch you in the next one you\n"