Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/23/this-casemod-turned-a-desktop-pc-into-an-actual-desktop.html
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I have two issues with this.
- why are there spinners. SSD preferably M2 only.
- I find the cooling suspect. For a standard desktop comp with a fairly cheap card sure. High end gaming? That fairly enclosed space is going to heat up way too much. Not nearly enough air flow.
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On the cooling the format is rather close but that is a lot of interior volume and it’s not too different from strategies used on very small format and fanless PCs. Plus he’s using that narrow format to direct the air in very specific ways which is a good notion.
The problems I’m seeing aren’t in the size and shape of the table, but his overall approach.
He’s got two banks of fans pointed directly at each other, which tends to cause a lot of turbulence. So it’s probably going negate his attempts to control the air flow.
And where are the vents. There’s no intake and no exhaust. Where is cold air coming from and where is hot air going. Seems like he thinks he can just circulate the air in and out of all the excess space on either end of the system. But after a bit you’ll just be recirculating hot air, there’s nothing here to cool the air and it’s too enclosed for that air to be replaced.
With a couple of invisible vents cut in there he could do a better job with far fewer fans. There are both lower profile active coolers and water coolers that would fit just fine and do the job if there was more air getting in.
He mentioned positive pressure. But that’s mostly about controlling dust. And involves pumping more air in than you take out. Not putting a lot of fans in an enclosed box.
It’s seems like he grabbed a bunch of cool seeming ideas without thinking them through.
My fantasy PC is a table top (or bottom) with which
one can swap out components on the fly (so to speak).
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The intakes are on the underside of the desk, near the right and left edges. The exhaust is the heatsinks on the GPU and CPU, which protrude under the desk.
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Yeah, exactly. And also to another point:
There’s a strip of plastic the height of the case splitting the case up into different ‘zones’, which prevents them from just blowing directly at each other. It’s really a remarkably smart solution, although I assume that many Noctua 40mm fans are not cheap.
Additionally, he ran it through 15 minutes of benchmarking, which is more than enough to really strain a GPU, and only got it up to 80 C I think, which is reasonably normal.
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I read the headline and thought “sigh, another ‘pc built into a desk’ mod, seen plenty of those”, but I have to admit, this is the neatest one I’ve seen.
The monitor/shelf is neat too, although I’d like more adjustability. I guess he could have built speakers into either end of that shelf as well. The ivy covering up the cables was a genius move.
I did have reservations about the cooling system at first, but that’s actually all pretty well thought out (I’ve definitely seen worse in ‘professionally’ built machines). Personally, I’d have tried to work out how to watercool it, but you’d need more thickness somewhere to fit a radiator in.
Although if I was building a desk I’d want drawers, and maybe I could take some space at the back of the drawers for a rad, and maybe a proper power supply in there too… hmmmmmmmm
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