All In One (AIO) water coolers are pretty good. I've got the Corsair H80 I think, which is like WilliamA's except a little bit more, I guess. Very straightforward to fit (well, about the same as normal ones) and not as gigantic and heavy as the air cooling ones, which I feel is good for these tower cases even if I intellectually know they must be fine.

If you're interested in water cooling I'd recommend spending a little more than I did on the Corsair H55. The cooling performance is excellent, it's well made and easy to fit, but it has a couple of issues. It was designed to be small and quiet, but to a price. This means, for instance, that the supplied fan is not PWM controlled out of the box and runs at one speed. On my Backup PC this is fine and the whole thing runs very quiet indeed. On the other PC, the fan could only be fitted at one point which seemed to be the sweet spot for case resonance and noise. After about 3 months of irritation I fixed it by replacing the fan with a better one from Corsair. 

One thing that did interest me. I saw that Chris built his PC on a full ATX board. Did you have any thoughts about this? Having just built a full-fat Windows PC on a tiny mini-stx board and leaving aside all the obvious jokes about size mattering, are you going for anything in particular?

Agreed, I went with a Corsair AIO water cooler when I built my Ryzen rig a couple of years back, it's been solid ever since and is nice and quiet. Mine is the H110i, it is PWM and can be controlled very easily from an app within Windows.

Personally, I'd also go the Ryzen route. AMD's current CPUs are very competitive in terms of performance, and usually much cheaper than Intel's chips as well. I have the Ryzen 7 1700X (8 core, 16 thread) and it's been great so far. Reliable and handles everything I throw at it with ease.

Another thing to consider is www.quietpc.com - decent site and plenty of bits that are designed/chosen to be nice and quiet. I bought my case, fans and CPU cooler from them, then eBuyered the other bits.

Only part I had a problem with was my original motherboard - I went for an MSI one and it had an intermittent fault with the SATA controller that caused some of my mechanical data drives to randomly disappear and re-appear. In the end I managed to RMA it and replaced it with a Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard which has been rock solid - I do also like that it has an LED character display on the board, so if it fails to boot at all, it is easy to look up the code in the manual and see where the issue is.

A lot of coolers now are huge. I was looking at Be Quiet and Noctua coolers and most are so tall they wouldn't fit in my tower case.

I did end up buying a smaller Noctua that's much quieter than the stock AMD but the bigger ones would have kept it a bit cooler.

On a account of Win 7 going unsupported last week & MrsD. needing online banking, we decided to do her a Win 10 + 'new' [refurb] pc twofer:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=7_158&item_id=123156


(& I get a server upgrade out of it)

Looks pretty decent and very good value at that price.

This'll be the 3rd refurb hp SFF we've bought for MrsD. in the past ~15-years. Usually better value than a home build for sub-gaming stuff, considering the OS is 'free'.

'budget copy'? u na fneek ect 

lol, I do enjoy a gag that takes that much effort to get in.

I wonder whatever happened to WeeDave. 

Trouble is, it's so old (as am I ) that I can't remember what it means anymore.

I was thinking Micro-ATX, possibly even re-using my existing case (although I'm likely to get a new one, although I'll be aiming for no sodding LEDs and side-windows if I can possibly avoid them.

Presumably with a mini-stx board, the size of the graphics card is a consideration?

Trying to think about what else I'll need - Keyboard, mouse, SATA DVD drive, storage HDD and monitors are all being kept from the existing system. Might try to move my Windows key across to the new system, although I can't remember what level of legit it is (it's quite legit, but might be OEM).

I've got a wi-fi card which plugs into a PCI Express slot on my motherboard, which I presume will still work, and an ageing Lexicon Lambda Studio USB Audio Interface I used for recording with, which I fully expect to mess about with for a few minutes trying to sort out ASIO issues and a high-pitched whine which won't go away, before punting it in favour of something more contemporary.

Things currently semi-permanently connected to my pc: Printer, keyboard, mouse, audio interface, external drive, joystick, SD card reader. I'll want USB ports. Lots of USB ports.

I was only curious because if I was building a PC now I'd probably aim to make it smaller than my current one. The case I have is an elderly Antec case but it dates back to when IDE cables were the norm so it has loads of space, but poor cable-management opportunities. I think the big empty panel areas make it noisy as well. The ultra cheap case I rebuilt my backup PC into is much smaller but all the cables can be threaded out of the way. 

And no, the miniature boards (stx and itx) are limited with either no graphics card provision or one PCI-e slot right on the edge. My stx board has no PCI-e slots apart from M.2 for an SSD and a wifi card.

I'm sure micro-ATX will be your best bet.

I hate how discreet GPUs take up two pci slots.

I don't think you'll be fitting a DVD drive in a Mini-STX case (at least not in any I've seen). If you really need the DVD drive, you'll probably need to put it in a separate case/caddy and connect it via eSATA or something.

Yeah, that's mainly why I went down the watercooling route in the end. The bit that clips onto the CPU for mine is quite small, then the radiator bolts to the roof of the case and vents directly outside. Of course, less use in a small case, but then I have to admit that mine is a normal ATX case (got 5 hard drives - so needed the space anyway!)

There are plenty of handsome and efficient external DVD drives (sometimes with DVD players built in) about. Once you've got one, you'll never need to weigh up whether you need an internal one again.

<edit> And I suspect one will last until DVDs are are definitively redundant.

You'll no doubt be able to get wifi built into the mobo to get around using any extra cards or requiring further slots.

Unless your eyesight is excellent, and your hands tiny, nimble and strong, you will profoundly curse trying to fit a tiny case.

Yeah, I'm thinking ATX/Micro-ATX rather than anything smaller.