Today i build a small system for my dad, well usually more a KodiBox.

I was never a big fan of the “4k TV Box” things you can buy for small money over the internet.
After convincing my dad to go for a computer base, i grabbed some spare parts i had left over – again? yeah…i still have a lot xD

Hardware on hand:
MSI Z97I Gaming AC Intel Z97 mITX
2x 2GB OCZ Platinum Edition 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
300W Cooler Master G550M PSU
Cooler Master Elite 120 Advanced
Intel Stock cooler
Maxtor HDD 250GB SATA

Hardware bought:
Intel® Core™ i3-4170

On arrival of the CPU, i started to gentle smash ( 😛 ) the parts into the small case. In the middle of the way, i knew why i switched from mITX to mATX.
It is always a pain to assemble such small system, even with all the benefits…but hey, thats just my personal opinion

After doing some adjustments and test runs, it was time to replace the dusty fans with some more quiet ones + a well decent cable management, because of the lack of space…so everything went up in the not used CD/DVD slots.
Everything was fine as it seem in that moment and i started to put a fresh copy of Win10 Pro in that little thing. Weirdly i started to love mITX more again after i was done? Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After finished the Win10 and all the ransome necessary MSI software installation, i gave that little box a prime95 bench for a half day just to be sure.
Then after this and having a stable system, i moved everything into the living room of my parents and set everything up.

Now the fun part started…
My dad started to install Kodi and setting it up for his needs – after a while he calls me that the computer just shut down…huh? wasn’t 12hrs of prime enough to call it stable?
Well, reboot and it should be fine…nope it wasn’t. It kept shutting down on random uptimes (5min, 20min, 1hr)

So what was the problem? broken hardware? heat which i thought that it was not…
After testing the system how it was, it was fine on my side but anyways, i gave that little thing a little upgrade on cooling and case

I just cleaned the case barely because on that time i spent a whole day on testing, benching and switching hardware to find the reason for the shut downs
So again, went for a full day prime stress test this time with the original hardware and it was stable all the time.

Back at my dad, it started to act again weird with random shut downs…even after reinstalling Kodi, nothing worked, so what was it then?
We have a quote in germany for such thing, it’s called “Kleinvieh macht auch Mist” which means hardly translated “small livestock makes poop too” – in other words i let the system run as i had it and in the end it showed up that the USB dongle for my dad’s keyboard and mouse was triggering the shut downs randomly, can’t even explain why.

So after giving him a new mouse and a stationary USB keyboard (he barely has to use it anyways) the system was running fine.
In the end he has now a “small” KodiBox which guaranteed will not shut down because of heat *ehem*

-XNovaCore