Building a MFF PC

For the past few years, my PC used to be a full tower case with a ATX motherboard. It had lots of space inside, tons of it infact. This is a hassle when you move enough times. Recently I have moved overseas and had to sell all the relatively non-expensive parts and took the expensive brains with me in my carry-on. For future reference I decided to write about my process so next time can have less hiccups.

Scarred by how cumbersome the full tower case and ATX board was, I decided to shrink to m-ATX with the appropriate case. When choosing between the mATX and Mini-ITX. The Mini-ITX was tempting, having a tiny box you could carry around sounded delightful, a freeing form not bound by weight and volume. Yet it meant expensive parts and finicky assembling, seems like the mATX is good enough for now.

The case has three forms of criteria: size, aesthetics and how much of a pain it is to assemble. I decided to follow the crowd and chose the Lian Li A3, as it is a popular case with plenty of documentation and the wood panelling looked quite stylish. For judging size, the 3D models provided by comparesffpc.com gave some good visuals.

For the motherboard, I chose the MSI B550M VDH-Pro. Throughout the years using my PC, I made no attempt to overclock so high-end heat-sinks aren’t useful for me and I only ever used a single PCIe slot for my GPU. The B55M VDH-Pro also had features that were appealing to me such as inbuilt bluetooth and HD audio connectors if I want to connect multiple headphones for some reason.

I chose the MSI MAG A850GL for the power supply, I originally had a 1000W platnium rated power supply but decided to downgrade to 850W since once again I don’t overclock. Turns out PC parts are much cheaper when you just don’t need overclocking. Something I overlooked is that newer GPUs use the 16-pin PCIe power cable. The MAG A850GL came with only 2 8-pin PCIe cables when my GPU needs three. Not good. The power supply itself has enough ports to power everything so I just need more cables. For now I have to daisy chain two of GPU ports(not good!). I ordered 3 8-pin PCIe cables for my power supply model from CableMod(maybe good?) which should hopefully fix this situation.

The final part I need is the cooler, choosing between the fan and AIO I decided to go for the cooler as it looked nicer. The Thermalright Infinity Cooler was my choice. Not much more thought was put into this since all I cared about is that it works good enough. After installation when I’m not wearing my headphones I occasionally hear a high-pitched whining noise so will choose a different AIO cooler for the next build.

Time to assemble!

Assembling the PC took a day, the first roadblock I hit was the the Phillips head screwdriver did not work with some of the screws and almost tripped some of the screws out of stubborness. I found that a small flat screwdriver was a better option. I first started with the motherboard and adding the CPU, M2 memory, RAM and heatsink from the AIO cooler. After gently placing the motherboard into the case, I decided to try adding the radiator. An issue when assembling a MFF PC is that your parts can easily obscure ports on the motherboard. Especially with the radiator blocking off the CPU power cable and fan and ARGB ports. Next time, I’ll need to check all the ports I’ll be using for the build before assembling. I then added fans as recommended in the Lian Li A3 manual and added the power supply. As more parts were added, cable management became increasingly important. With enough zip ties it eventually looked less like spaghetti but even the fans had extra length which I tried to hide behind other parts. The Lian Li A3 case doesn’t provide extra space behind the motherboard so you have to figure out other locations to hide the cables yourself. Make sure to deal with cable management before you add the GPU since you won’t be able to reach any the cables after adding it.

With everything set up, now I can return to the software rabbithole.