This customer wanted a small, quiet workstation with good single-threaded performance in an interesting/different case; the end result was:
Silverstone’s FT-03 Mini chassis is a well thought-out, elegant little case which feels top-notch in terms of build quality – thanks in no small part to the extremely thick aluminium sides;
The case sides are surprisingly heavy! For the interior, we went with an Asus Z77 board and a 3570K, overclocked to 4.5GHz;
With a self-contained liquid cooling unit the system stays extremely quiet, even under load – the chip is capable of clocking higher with some more volts, but in this case 4.5GHz was the sweet spot in terms of performance vs. noise/heat. The fan on the underside was replaced with a BitFenix Spectre Pro Red LED 140mm – the red glow coming from underneath the case while it’s running gave the aesthetic a slight edge. With some nice 2133MHz RAM, a Crucial M4 SSD and an extremely power efficient PSU the build performs extremely well while still remaining power efficient and quiet.
