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As this Sapphire Pure Fusion board will be retailing in the UK for around £80-£90 inc vat, we wanted to keep the cost of our system build down as low as possible.
Thermaltake create one of the nicest, low cost media chassis on the market, the Element Q. This can be picked up for around £50 inc vat and includes a small power supply ideal for powering the Sapphire Pure Fusion Mini 350 motherboard.
The Element Q is a very attractive design – very simple, with an orange accent at the front. There are plenty of air vents on the side panels to help with airflow. To keep noise to a minimum there are no fans in the case, and we won't need any with the cool running AMD design.
Four screws hold the chassis in place, and when removed it slides backwards. Thermaltake save space by bundling the extras inside the chassis. There are mounting screws, rubber feet, drive holders and a speaker.
The first step in the system build is to remove the power supply completely. This ensures more working space for the motherboard installation.
This motherboard requires DDR3 SO-DIMMs, which are slightly more expensive than ordinary desktop based DDR3 sticks. Above, we are using 4GB of Samsung 1066mhz memory which costs around £50 online. Check ebay for up to the minute low price deals. It can also support cheaper, slower 800mhz memory, but we strongly recommend you spend a little extra.
The motherboard is installed by simply using four of the supplied screws in the bundle. The case supports both 2.5 inch and 3.5 inch drives, for this particular build we are using a cheap 2.5 inch 250GB hard drive.
Once the motherboard and hard drive are fitted and all the cabling is sorted, the power supply can be returned to place. The case can also house an optical drive, although we prefer to use an external ASUS bluray unit.
The system build, which took literally 10 minutes to complete.
The finished system build. Very sexy.
