Potentially controversial, could you flip it, have the vents on the bottom?
What’s you view on making the back of the case multi functional?
hdplex make a small passive case the H1, previous versions had a back plate that would support a single PCIE extension slot on a riser sat above a thin ITX board.
I had considered flipping it. My first designs when I started looking at machining a case from one piece was to have it intake from the bottom and exhaust out the top in a Surface inspired design style. It would make the intake side much simpler as it wouldn't need to be aesthetically pleasing or a consistent design since it wouldn't normally be visible. In this instance I'd probably have a 120mm opening around where the CPU cooler would be so that a standard fan filter could be used. This should also give a path for airflow, as simply flipping the design in the original post would likely result in hot air getting heavily recirculated. I'll include some images of that concept at the end of this post.
Having it be multifunctional is not something I had considered. With so few thin ITX boards out there I'd be concerned about adding complexity to the overall design to fulfil a very small market.
This looks really cool, I agree with the comments regarding top vents and dust. I like the erring on the side of good ventilation however.
Question: Have you considered a brickless design or is the vision to have the smallest pure APU case possible? Just for me, I would give up a little extra space to ditch the external brick, but again I might be alone there.
Thanks, it looks like there are two ways forward at the moment. Either stick with the original design with multiple holes in the top and add a filter. Or go with something that intakes from the bottom, like the concept at the end of this post.
I prefer fully internal power supplies myself. I did look at it briefly, but it significantly increases the overall size of the case to include something like the HDPlex 200w AC/DC unit internally. LCD monitors seem to have gone full circle, external bricks, to brickless, and now it seems common for them to be back to external bricks. I recently purchased a pair of LG 27" monitors that have external bricks.
Being CNC machined rather than sheet metal construction means that I could produce both options without having to invest too much in tooling. There would be fixtures for machining, but certainly nothing like the costs for forming dies etc.
