A lot of coolers now are huge. I was looking at Be Quiet and Noctua coolers and most are so tall they wouldn't fit in my tower case.

I did end up buying a smaller Noctua that's much quieter than the stock AMD but the bigger ones would have kept it a bit cooler.

On a account of Win 7 going unsupported last week & MrsD. needing online banking, we decided to do her a Win 10 + 'new' [refurb] pc twofer:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=7_158&item_id=123156


(& I get a server upgrade out of it)

Looks pretty decent and very good value at that price.

This'll be the 3rd refurb hp SFF we've bought for MrsD. in the past ~15-years. Usually better value than a home build for sub-gaming stuff, considering the OS is 'free'.

'budget copy'? u na fneek ect 

lol, I do enjoy a gag that takes that much effort to get in.

I wonder whatever happened to WeeDave. 

Trouble is, it's so old (as am I ) that I can't remember what it means anymore.

I was thinking Micro-ATX, possibly even re-using my existing case (although I'm likely to get a new one, although I'll be aiming for no sodding LEDs and side-windows if I can possibly avoid them.

Presumably with a mini-stx board, the size of the graphics card is a consideration?

Trying to think about what else I'll need - Keyboard, mouse, SATA DVD drive, storage HDD and monitors are all being kept from the existing system. Might try to move my Windows key across to the new system, although I can't remember what level of legit it is (it's quite legit, but might be OEM).

I've got a wi-fi card which plugs into a PCI Express slot on my motherboard, which I presume will still work, and an ageing Lexicon Lambda Studio USB Audio Interface I used for recording with, which I fully expect to mess about with for a few minutes trying to sort out ASIO issues and a high-pitched whine which won't go away, before punting it in favour of something more contemporary.

Things currently semi-permanently connected to my pc: Printer, keyboard, mouse, audio interface, external drive, joystick, SD card reader. I'll want USB ports. Lots of USB ports.

I was only curious because if I was building a PC now I'd probably aim to make it smaller than my current one. The case I have is an elderly Antec case but it dates back to when IDE cables were the norm so it has loads of space, but poor cable-management opportunities. I think the big empty panel areas make it noisy as well. The ultra cheap case I rebuilt my backup PC into is much smaller but all the cables can be threaded out of the way. 

And no, the miniature boards (stx and itx) are limited with either no graphics card provision or one PCI-e slot right on the edge. My stx board has no PCI-e slots apart from M.2 for an SSD and a wifi card.

I'm sure micro-ATX will be your best bet.

I hate how discreet GPUs take up two pci slots.

I don't think you'll be fitting a DVD drive in a Mini-STX case (at least not in any I've seen). If you really need the DVD drive, you'll probably need to put it in a separate case/caddy and connect it via eSATA or something.

Yeah, that's mainly why I went down the watercooling route in the end. The bit that clips onto the CPU for mine is quite small, then the radiator bolts to the roof of the case and vents directly outside. Of course, less use in a small case, but then I have to admit that mine is a normal ATX case (got 5 hard drives - so needed the space anyway!)

There are plenty of handsome and efficient external DVD drives (sometimes with DVD players built in) about. Once you've got one, you'll never need to weigh up whether you need an internal one again.

<edit> And I suspect one will last until DVDs are are definitively redundant.

You'll no doubt be able to get wifi built into the mobo to get around using any extra cards or requiring further slots.

Unless your eyesight is excellent, and your hands tiny, nimble and strong, you will profoundly curse trying to fit a tiny case.

Yeah, I'm thinking ATX/Micro-ATX rather than anything smaller.

Hmph. The i5-4570 has a higher "cpu mark" rating than the Athlon X4 950 I got two years ago. Also it currently retails for ~Can.$270 (compared to the ~Can.$100 I paid for the Athlon), so the pc is deffo some kind of bargain (we took delivery of it a couple of days ago, so I'll be setting it up this weekend).

According to system info, the i5-4570 in MrsD.'s 'new' pc  has virtualization disabled (a feature she'll likely never need), which could explain the low price (pc originally ~US$800 new). However, the cpu is upgradeable, and there's an open pci-x16 slot for a discreet gpu (integrated Intel HD 4600 onboard), useful to know for future repurposing, though there are likely significant performance-limiting factors. She is quite taken with Windows 10; the latest iteration has the dreaded tiling replaced with a more familiar and user-friendly classic desktop.

Strangely, the dvd writer it came with is a slim/laptop design of appalling slow read speed (or maybe it didn't like a data disk I burned on my pc to xfer her documents).

Virtualization might just be disabled in the BIOS. But honestly you'll only need it if you plan to run virtual machines on it.