Hey all, student building a sff workstation.

I've been through this forum lots of times but I'm just now joining because I'm finally getting back into pc building properly. What a great time to start back again lol, with the gpu shortage and all. Anyway my name's Max, I'm 22 and I built my last rig when I was 15. I'm in my last semester of college studying illustration and industrial design. Back when I built my last computer, I just used my computer for games, and while it can't run the latest and greatest, the gtx 970 and dual core i3 still work well enough for that use case. Nowadays though I actually do work on my PC and that has really made its spec seem even more out of date. In my illustration practice even trying to multitask a little, running Photoshop and illustrator at the same time or having Firefox open for reference, really stresses my cpu, ram and storage leading to frequent hitches and sometimes lockups. Now that I've started to use cad and blender more its worse. I built that system in a bitfenix prodigy, (which I used to think was small) and I figured the second time around Id go even smaller, particularily now that I wont be using any spinning disc storage.

I'm excited about this project and figured it was about time I stop lurking and share it with like minded ppl. Here's my plan: I got a cheap 1u chassis off ebay (seems like new old stock or something) with two full length pci slots! So with some case modding I'm going to squeeze all the hardware I can into it and mount it on rails under my desk for a really simple to fabricate, maintain and move desk pc. I did some napkin math and with the roughly 12 by 17.5 inch interior space It'll be a little over 5 liters of volume. Pics are below I'm going to draw up some concept designs this weekend hopefully and do some testing on the system, install linux, etc.




Specs so far:
i9-10900 (the box says 540 but I only payed 320)
Gigabyte Aorus Z490I
EVGA GTX 970 (an evga 3060 ti would be perfect for this sytem if they existed lol)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200 CL16
2x 1tb samsung 970 evo plus m.2 gum sticks
 

scatterforce

Master of Cramming
May 21, 2018
408
325
Welcome!

Nice build. What do you plan to use for power and how will you cool the CPU? You have some good options now.
 
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MinMax

Case Bender
Original poster
New User
Mar 10, 2021
2
3
Welcome!

Nice build. What do you plan to use for power and how will you cool the CPU? You have some good options now.
Thanks!

When I do a test fit with the lid off I plan to do a cpu and gpu stress test using the 850w atx power-supply that's in my current pc hooked into a wall wattage meter. That way I can get some real world power draw numbers and see how well the cpu does with the stock cooler. If I'm able to id like to use the HDplex 400w nano atx combo, if I can't I'00 use a flex atx psu. That would save a lot of space, particularly for the cooling solution I'm considering. I might go watercooled on the cpu. I figure using alpha-cools 1u components it will be cooler and quieter than using a super low profile air cooler. Plus I might even be able to fit enough thermal mass in there to add a gpu block down the line when I can get my hands on a more modern card.
 

Wendone

Case Bender
New User
Jun 24, 2022
2
1
I've been through this forum lots of times but I'm just now joining because I'm finally getting back into pc building properly. What a great time to start back again lol, with the gpu shortage and all. Anyway my name's Max, I'm 22 and I built my last rig when I was 15. I'm in my last semester of college studying illustration and industrial design. Back when I built my last computer, I just used my computer for games, and while it can't run the latest and greatest, the gtx 970 and dual core i3 still work well enough for that use case. Nowadays though I actually do work on my PC and that has really made its spec seem even more out of date. In my illustration practice even trying to multitask a little, running Photoshop and illustrator at the same time or having Firefox open for reference, really stresses my cpu, ram and storage leading to frequent hitches and sometimes lockups. Now that I've started to use cad and blender more its worse. I built that system in a bitfenix prodigy, (which I used to think was small) and I figured the second time around Id go even smaller, particularily now that I wont be using any spinning disc storage.

I'm excited about this project and figured it was about time I stop lurking and share it with like minded ppl. Here's my plan: I got a cheap 1u chassis off ebay (seems like new old stock or something) with two full length pci slots! So with some case modding I'm going to squeeze all the hardware I can into it and mount it on rails under my desk for a really simple to fabricate, maintain and move desk pc. I did some napkin math and with the roughly 12 by 17.5 inch interior space It'll be a little over 5 liters of volume. Pics are below I'm going to draw up some concept designs this weekend hopefully and do some testing on the system, install linux, etc. I'm thinking of designing the hull in some unusual way, for example based on the book The Tell-Tale Heart, there are interesting concepts. I've read a couple of works at https://freebooksummary.com/category/the-tell-tale-heart-essays and I can tell you there's a lot to take in. It's a very dark story with textured characters that a lot of the artists draw from.




Specs so far:
i9-10900 (the box says 540 but I only payed 320)
Gigabyte Aorus Z490I
EVGA GTX 970 (an evga 3060 ti would be perfect for this sytem if they existed lol)
Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200 CL16
2x 1tb samsung 970 evo plus m.2 gum sticks

Very well done, now want to know the results of the test and what this assembly is capable of.