De-FORMD : How does a Full Tower Look on a Tiny SFF Case?

The SFF Community typically has a habit of crippling the CPU while giving full bandwidth to the GPU. Most of the cases are also designed around it. It comes from the fact that most of the SFF community focuses on gaming builds and it makes sense for gaming devices. However, I think more and more general purpose users are moving towards small form factor builds these days, a cohort of which I am a part of as well.

Most of the workloads I have are both CPU and GPU heavy, stuff related to media production and ML Development. My currently SFF build in the Formed T1 has a decent CPU cooler, the Noctua L12S but it falls short to cool down my mighty 13900K properly. It often hits the limits and throttles badly. I travel with this build a lot, so liquid cooling is also not an option, nor can I make it stupidly big. I am planning to move to a slightly bigger case where I can put a full tower air cooler, along with hopefully a 40 series GPU.

But before pulling the plug on that, I wanted to test out how it performs, and also I thought it would be funny to try out installing a huge cooler on the FormD T1. I saw a similar experiment on reddit with the Noctua NH D15 but recently I am seeing the Cooler Master MA 824 Stealth is dominating on the benchmarks so I wanted to try out this one.

Sure enough, the results look great! The temps never hit 100C and the Cinebench Score also went up from 28K to 35K on multi-threaded processing. The next step is to actually find a proper cage for it and also to add a 40 series GPU which is going to be my next experiment.

Check out the video below!