LAST MONTH, we had a fantastic reader question surrounding our lack of AMD ITX builds. We’ve done numerous Intel ones, but Team Red was nowhere to be found. The reason for that: a lack of motherboards. AMD systems don’t naturally lend themselves to ITX investment. In fact, you can count the ITX boards for the AM5 platform without running out of fingers (at least the ones we can request in).
Still, it got us thinking about how much power you could slip into an ITX rig these days, particularly with 9th gen Ryzen and Nvidia’s latest 50 series. With the launch of Team Green’s latest twin-slot Founders Edition cards, it really got us thinking. We grabbed our Ryzen 9 9900X, 32GB of 7400 MT/s memory, one of Nvidia’s latest RTX 5080s, and a Fractal Design Era 2, and started pulling the parts together to build something truly potent.
Did we succeed? Yep; this thing’s an absolute goliath. From insanely high frame rates, to dominant CPU performance and astoundingly respectable power and temperatures, it just dominates in every arena, with a remarkably small footprint.