Mod Candidate: APEX MI-008?

[zovc]

Hey,

Today I decided to kill some time digging through cheap ITX cases and I found what could be a cool, small vessel for an ITX motherboard and GPU. The APEX MI-008! At the moment, it sells for just under $40US on Newegg, I haven't looked anywhere else.

The case is cheap enough that I'm considering buying one without any particular system plan in mind, but I'm wondering if anyone can help me figure out if a ~280mm video card would fit inside of this case in the PSU area, possibly along with a 120mm radiator+fan in the "font-bottom" for CPU cooling.

Here's an outline of what I'm thinking for the GPU, I did this in a bit of a hurry, so it's not really to scale, but I can try to get a more accurate sense of scale tonight. I just copied and pasted the single slot from the case and pasted it twice, they would probably be a little closer together. The plan would be for the GPU to intake from the top of the case.


If I was going to do this, what would be the ideal way of adding PCI slots to the PSU area of the case? I could probably salvage some from an old case and rivet them to this one, right?

 

[Duality92]

slap a 1070 Katana in that with a silverstone SFX PSU!

 

[zovc]

slap a 1070 Katana in that with a silverstone SFX PSU!

I don't want to use an Nvidia card.

 

[zovc]

Here's the best my skillset could do to mock up a SAPPHIRE NITRO+ RX Vega64 in there. I was able to find good product pictures, and it's a big card.


According to the dimensions, "~310mm" (not sure if that includes the PCI bracket) would definitely be a tight fit in a "340mm" case, (assuming the 340mm includes the plastic front cover) but it's hard to know if I properly scaled things given the pictures' perspectives and such.

What really surprised me about this mock-up is how much 'horizontal' space we have since the card is a lot narrower than a motherboard's 170mm. It seems like it might be possible to fit an AC-DC solution inside of the case given that space.

 

[IntoxicatedPuma]

Almost as good as an element Q but it has inferior asthetics.

 

[zovc]

It looks like the cases are probably made by the same factory! One thing I gave some thought was looking more into a custom front panel like @confusis did with one of his smaller beige units.

Other advantages of a custom front panel would be guaranteeing a larger GPU could fit (if I needed) and custom front I/O.

 

[Windfall]

It looks like the cases are probably made by the same factory! One thing I gave some thought was looking more into a custom front panel like @confusis did with one of his smaller beige units.

Other advantages of a custom front panel would be guaranteeing a larger GPU could fit (if I needed) and custom front I/O.

Links to these beige units please.

 

[zovc]

Links to these beige units please.

PC-IT, there's also PC-NT, but that didn't have any custom 3D printing, I don't think.

 

[confusis]

PC-NT was just a beige NCase M1.

 

[Windfall]

PC-IT, there's also PC-NT, but that didn't have any custom 3D printing, I don't think.

PC-NT was just a beige NCase M1.

Thanks, love anything beige!