Built from scratch case: sub 9L

[aromachi]

Started my quest by twisting some wire fencing together to form some wire "rods" and JB welding them into a frame. I liked the result, but it needed some refining.. and I wanted to go SMALLER.

Bought some 1/2" aluminum angle rods from Lowes and started putting together a frame with more or less zero tolerances on all sides. Painted everything glossy black, then started shoving parts in.

Once I got my rubber washers and acrylic in the mail I started cutting/sanding/drilling and finally got the acrylic attached.

Case measures: 5.9"x 8" x 11.5"​

Volume: ~8.9L​

Cost: ~$25 of lowes hardware, and $15 worth of 1/8" smoked acrylic.​

To Do List:

Attach air-filters at intakes​

Repaint some corners of the frame​

Maybe add a handle​

Re-sand some edges on the acrylic​

Fix fan rattle on gfx card​

Adjust fan curves​

Cable Management​

Components:

Ryzen 5 1600​

ASRock AB350 ITX​

G.Skill Trident Z 16GB 3200​

Silicon Power 1 TB M.2 2280 NVME​

Zotac GTX 1660 Ti 6GB​

HEC 650W ATX PSU​

Raidmax 120mm Fan​

​

Let me know what you think!

 

[DemLep]

Turned out nice. Is it acrylic on the back side too?
How is the air flow?
I would look into switching out the screws for black painted one, but that's just me.

 

[aromachi]

Turned out nice. Is it acrylic on the back side too?
How is the air flow?
I would look into switching out the screws for black painted one, but that's just me.

Yeah, acrylic everywhere but the bottom. And, yeah I agree, black screws would def look better.

Idle temps are 3C over what they were without acrylic. Air flow seems adequate. Haven't done too much stress testing yet due to the holidays/work schedule.

 

[DemLep]

Cool.
I wouldn't expect Idle temps to be too bad, though I am curious to see how hot it gets under normal work loads and when stressed. When you get the time definitely do a test.

 

[aromachi]

Cool.
I wouldn't expect Idle temps to be too bad, though I am curious to see how hot it gets under normal work loads and when stressed. When you get the time definitely do a test.

So with the default fan curve obviously things get out of hand. GPU was pushing 90c and CPU was up in the 80s. Did some fan curve tweaking and now GPU maxes out at 70c, but that's with fans hitting 3k+ rpm (loud). Haven't seen CPU go over 77c while benchmarking, which is amazing considering it's a stock cooler, and it stayed really quiet (Go AMD!!) Further tweaking will be required to get a desirable sound/temp ratio.

I'm chalking it up as a success. The next version will have an sfx psu, the graphics card will be vertically oriented behind the mobo, and the case will have dual intake fans. Should be able to make it quite a bit smaller than this one..