[quote=Island Dog]MicroATX motherboards can handle nearly any CPU and other current gen items.  MiniITX are more limited, but as smaller systems have become more popular, more options are out there than there was not too long ago.

If you read my last comment you'll see I don't use or need optical drives.[/quote]

Ok if you dont need an optical drive... I dont know i might be old fashioned but if windows needs certain MObo drivers they usually come on disk and without out the ethernet driver you are unable to dl those without another pc... (who knows, might be that you have those on a USB drive)

Just had a look did not expect that the newer sockets are supported yet but they are.
I was worried about the amount of PCI-E slots such a board has to offer but they managed to get up to three  PCI-E 3.0 x16 on them and that is not bad at all.

Looks like building a small "beast" is now possible even with Air cooling 

 

Yes, for a compact case it has rather good air cooling, but adding liquid cooling for the CPU and GPU(s) would allow for some 'beastly' high-end components to be installed.... so yes, it has potential to become quite a decent work/gaming machine.  However, I'm a bit like Jafo when it comes to my main rig.... bigger is better cos there's alot of stuff to go inside: what with multiple HDDs and SDDs; Dual GPUs; soundcards; TV Tuner Cards; SATA and IDE expansion cards, etc.

Having said that, I could see a couple of these replacing the towers housing my backup and guest PCs... cos they're compact and so much better looking than those old things.  Those cream/white towers may have looked good in their day, but I much prefer black finishes for all my PC gear, looks slick and more elegant IMHO.

no opto is fine till you NEED to re-install the OS that is on a DISC, and the carbo 540 looks like a nice SMALL case, but it does NOT have enough HDD bays for me to even consider it.

harpo the NON-subscriber

External USB Optical drive can cover for those rare usages - most mobos support booting from USB drives now. 

That's when you use an external drive bay and e-SATA to hook it up.  I have a 4 bay one that sits nicely out of the way and performs as well as any internal drive bay.  Just sayin'.

Yes, USBs can be used to install just about anything these days, and I often use them, but I still like to have an optical drive on board for those burning jobs that pop up from time to time: eg, making hard copies of important files... to be sure, to be sure.  And these days I use the Bluray format for larger jobs cos it works out more economical than using several DVD or CD discs. 

In fact, I recently read about a bootable drive image that incudes all program installations, plus updates and the OS, etc.  In the past that was not possible with the size restriction of DVDs, but now it is with Bluray discs holding considerably more data...just gotta read up more to see how it is done...

... now where's that damned magazine again, grrrr.

@starkers sorry quote does not work for me 
you could go for SLI or Xfire  just would need more fans like i mentioned
you would still have one slot free for a soundcard if you want to have a better one than the on-board sound or you could add your TV card
still if you want PCI-e SSD your limited of course

To the liquid cooling part for the CPU don’t let yourself fool the closed prefilled corsair liquid cooling isn’t as good as a Noctua NH-D14 
There have been numerous tests were they overclock the CPU and a BSOD pops up on corsair while the system stays stable with the NH-D14
However if you use proper Liquid cooling with a big radiator that’s a different story.
When it comes to GPU´s most reference cards get blazing hot while other DC, OC cards mostly come with different coolers that are pretty good ASUS cards for example stay cool unless you let them run on 100% usage with certain tools. But in practice that hardly ever happens.
For example i have a solely Air cooled Rig i never exceed CPU temps of 40C and my GPU is mostly on 60C on Ultra settings when gaming mainly because i have a fan positioned to blow right onto the card. And my rig is super silent you don’t hear anything but air moving but that’s it.
I know some rigs that have reference cards installed that sound like a vacuum cleaners when they get beyond 50% Fan speed.
Bought a "Gainward Phantom" one day because i was told they would stay cool well it did but the noise was terrible.

Doesn't work for me, either.  I have been doing quotes manually by typing [quote] then doing the same again but with a forward slash before the word quote and copy/pasting the text between them.

With regard to the expansion cards I'd use in these cases, I'd only be using a single GPU, a Nvidia 9800GTX, a Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme and a Winfast DTV 2000 TV tuner card for my spare/backup PC, so I wouldn't have any issues with available slots there.  Not exactly recent or high-end, but I have 2 other rigs for that. 

As for the guest PC, which is mostly be used for surfing the net, maybe writing up documents, etc, well it's fairly basic, with onboard sound and graphics, a standard SATA HDD for the OS [Vista Home x64] and a bit of storage, so it would fit nicely into one of these cases.

As for the Corsair liquid cooling, I have found the Hydro Series H80i to be quite efficient with my Intel i7 4790K, not that I've attempted to overclock it as yet.  I haven't looked at it as of late [due to it still being packed] but I do recall temps well below 40c, usually hovering around the 32c to 34c mark.  I'm currently using my 2nd rig [was easier to get out of storage], which has an AMD FX 8150 that is air cooled by a Thermaltake FRIO-OCK with 6 heatpipes, but that and what's in that case [Thermaltake Chaser full tower] wouldn't fit in this Corsair case.

starkers, the problems with external drives are

1 MORE powerpoints in use, and more power being used (assuming the higher capacity desktop drive externals)(also the laptop (no power brick) drives are SLOWER than the desktop drives and hold less data

2 usb3 interface does slow the data transfers compared to the internal sata 3 to the same model drive

3 external drives usually run about 10+ c hotter (hdds make cpus look temp tolerant) and with hdds you want the temps to be as close to ambient as possible, not as FAR as possible (and hdds should NOT exceed 50 c, and it is not uncommon with an ambient of 30c to have external hdds get to 60c)

4 extra desk space taken up by external drives

5 usb interface occasionally FORGETS that it is connected (even in the middle of transfers, corrupting the hdd AND the transfer)

harpo the NON-subscriber

That 40C temp mentioned was while playing games like Lord of the Fallen where physX is handled via CPU isntead of GPU due of crashes. 
The idle temps are much lower though.
This is not idle but shows some normal usage temps