Swear Silverstone did a Raven thing like that.

No no, thats not how you do it these days - just go on ebay and buy a Windows 10 activation key for peanuts. I needed to activate my Windows 10 last year and bought the key for 3 usd on ebay. But before that you just have to download the Windows 10 itself from the official Microsoft site and install it.

This, Windows 10 in reality is like less than £10.

Yea I have opposite problem than you when it comes to work.  I work 10 hour shifts and forced to stand and go back and forth between ICT and Flying Probe testers.  No sitting allowed till breaks.  So when I get home I don't mind where I sit my ass down as long as it is a chair.  One good thing about my work is that I'd probably be a complete fat ass if I didn't get 20k steps in a day at work.  Now if only I can manage to curb my alcohol consumption I'd be one fine tuned machine.

Good luck on your mini pc.  Least you didn't waste money on a Steam box!

Thanks for the review link - yeah, GPU cooling seems to be a slight concern... Perhaps I should opt for this - here'a review, just fyi 

I've actually just noticed that the i5-9400 is just around the corner - or at least available on pre-order - is it worth waiting? Tried to find info on it's performance bump over the 8400 but details seem thin on the ground...

Yeah, Scan has Silverstone Raven and Fortress - I'm now gravitating to the latter as I'm not a fan of plastic - though is pricier than Raven & Fractal options...

Ah, good to know, thanks - that's potentially freed up some funds for the escalating case budget :)

@ bold - yeah, but where'd be the fun in that!!

Thanks, quite looking forward to seeing what an RTX 2060 can do (coming from GTX 660 SLI)

An extra 0.1GHz, nope. Although the 9400F does lose the igpu, so will run cooler, but if your gpu fails it is handy to have one. Fortress is a nice case, depending on which one of course. I had a custom purple fortress mini once, it was nice.

The case will accommodate a full 310 mm long GPU.

The Geforce 2060 is 226.06mm long, the GPU is laid down, so it doesn't need much in the way of case Z-Height.

I think it would be fine. - You are only running a Geforce 2060 and a Core i5 8400, so you should be fine, if not... Try your hand at undervolting! :)

The Fortress case will be a good step up as well in that aspect.

The 9400F is already available here. - There is really zero performance differences from architectural changes... But there is a 100mhz clockspeed bump... So basically any performance improvements will be inconsequential.

Have you thought about going Ryzen? AMD is smashing it right now... And for good reason.

The ASUS ROG Strix B450-I Gaming + Ryzen 7 2700 would be hard to pass up right now.


...Also. Why the Sata SSD? Go big or go home! :) (Hint: NVMe)
It's hard not to recommend Crucial at the moment... Great price/performance across the spectrum.

In any case, just 500GB is pretty small and will only allow a couple games to be installed these days.

Hence my suggestion: First, get an AMD CPU. Then, get a 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD and a 2TB 2.5" HDD and combine them with AMDs StoreMI into one single drive that's as fast as a SATA SSD but costs significantly less for the amount of storage it provides.