The Birth Of Vulcan – Small Form Factor Gaming PC

As much as I loved my previous gaming build, Ghost, it was a little too “showy” for my conservative aesthetic preference. I decided to dive into the world of small form factor (SFF) cases for my new PC, dubbed Vulcan. Here’s a comparison of all of the PC cases I’ve built in with the format: PC name – case type – empty case weight – case volume

• Overmind – Antec 900 – 18.5 pounds – 47.4 liters
• Tassadar – Thermaltake Chaser MK-I – 25.6 pounds – 78.2 liters
• Zeratul – Fractal Define Nano S – 11 pounds – 26.8 liters
• Bahamut – Thermaltake Core P1 TG – 20.9 pounds – 53.5 liters
• Ghost – Lian Li O11D Snow Edition – 24.2 pounds – 43 liters
• Vulcan – Lian Li/DAN A4-H2O – 6.39 pounds – 11.1 liters

I retained Ghost’s RTX 3080 Ti and power supply unit (PSU) for Vulcan. I also decided to standardize the work area with Corsair iCUE RGB lighting (mouse pad, RGB lights under the shelf, etc.) Building in such a small case, I was concerned about thermals (and related fan noise), cable management, and actually assembling everything with limited wiggle room, but the A4 H2O case alleviated these issues.

In sleep mode, the system (including the monitor) uses ~ 3 Watts. In the middle of a Counter-Strike 2 match, it pushes 600 Watts. Geekbench 6 benchmarks are as follows at the time of this writing: 2719 (single-core CPU score), 18108 (multi-core CPU score), 144971 (Vulkan GPU compute API), 195454 (OpenCL GPU compute API).

Here are the complete specs with some pictures!