But aside from these two scenarios, you don’t need a GPU. A discrete card will only add more power consumption, noise, and heat to your system. It will also take up valuable PCIe slots and space on your rig. While most of us wouldn’t frown at the idea, this is a NAS case and that’s not going to help where it matters the most. This means that should you decide to load the case up with 2.5″ mechanical HDDs, they are going to run hot, especially drives 4+5 and will likely lead to premature HDD failures. Such compact cases with little space “behind” the PSU are a prime example of the one disadvantage modular PSUs have in such space-constrainted situations: A need for additional space for those plugs there.

The functionality of the hot-swap bays are very smooth and not janky. They don’t feel cheap at all.Should you desire a little more horsepower for 4k transcoding, emulation, or the occasional gaming session, this is no longer a possibility. Two key specifications to look at here is the limitation of 65mm CPU Cooler height. At this size, a standard Intel Xeon E3/ Xeon E heatsink will work fine, but it is a tight fit for any aftermarket coolers. Next, is the PSU depth specification at 100mm, this falls into the SFX PSU size.

All I’m trying to do when I burn-in one of my NAS machines is to look for any kind of defect in the computer’s hardware or how it’s been put together. My primary concern is that once I button up the case, I’d rather not have to open it up until I’m doing some sort of upgrade. I tend to zero in on the motherboard, CPU, and RAM in how I burn-in the DIY NAS. The fact that I have redundancy amongst the hard drives makes me feel a bit cavalier about testing the hard drives. At this point, some of our eagle-eyed viewers might recognize that the Silverstone CS280 is using the exact same platform as the Silverstone SG05/SG13. I was also looking at the DS380 originally, but once I saw than it supported mini-ITX mobos only, crossed it off my list -- I want more than one PCIe slot for future expansion.Altogether, it used all 4 of the CPU core to make 4 passes of the 12 different testing algorithms types supported without any reported errors. Usually, I just like to leave the memory test running for day(s) on end while I work on other things, but the free version of PassMark’s Memtest86 is sadly limited to 4 passes, which should be more than enough to give me a warm and fuzzy feeling about the RAM installed. I got an especially warm and fuzzy feeling, as I had to do this several times as I tried to capture it in video for the blog. But for a Network Attached Storage, you want your cooling to be focused on your drives, especially if they’re HDDs. This is a small letdown. Be aware that premature failure is possible if you don’t get your thermals right. While I opted for the Supermico A2SDI-4C-HLN4F, I liked that the Supermicro family of motherboards contained several bigger, badder versions of the motherboard also available for DIY NAS builders: The chassis was well protected inside two sheets of high-density foam. The cardboard box felt robust enough to survive the journey and it held up really well. This case is an ITX enclosure that barely supports six 3.5″ drives. But we consider it fit for a NAS build because it manages impressive support for 11 2.5″ drive bays too. The Phenom does this without sacrificing on GPU support, as up to 320 mm GPUs will fit.