Production Sapele Retro: a Noctua themed workstation mini ITX with a Quadro gpu

[NastyNick]

This custom case stand is milled from a solid piece of African Sapele wood. It acts like a hidden partition to house the 400w psu, custom front panel i/o, extra cables and functions as chimney with dual Noctua exhaust fans. I can make you one with any species of wood you like, that will be much cleaner than this prototype.

Mobo: ASRock z390 Phantom gaming
Case: iStarUSA S-21
CPU: I7 - 9700k
Cooler: NF-L9x65
GPU: PNY Quadro P1000
Case Intake fans: Noctua NF-A8 (x2)
Exhaust fans: Noctua NF-A9x14, Noctua NF-A4x10 (x3)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 1 TB
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16g (2x8g) DDR4 3200
PSU: Silverstone
Riser: Linkup PCIE x16

 

[JDragon]

The wooden stand looks very classy with the Noctua fans. I think an open-air design built around a wooden frame would also look great; wouldn't have to break up that sharp looking wood with exhausts and whatnot.

 

[AstroWan]

The fact you could fit and handle all that cable management in such a clean and small amount of room, with the really beautiful finish on the wood just has me mesmerized. I've never been one for the color pallet of noctua fans but wow does it do it justice. I'm a little concerned with how unsupported the small card below is though, it almost looks like the cables near the bottom are pushing down on that half size card.. Besides that, it looks fantastic and I love the design.

 

[NastyNick]

@JDragon and @AstroWan, thank you for your feedback! Much appreciated. I kind of needed to use Noctua for the form factor and decided to really lean into the color way. I could have hidden the exhaust fans on the back, but I really wanted to show them off. I’m glad you like it. My pictures don’t do the Sapele wood justice, it’s really beautiful stuff, naturally.

Your absolutely right: the gpu is getting pushed down by the front header usb 3.1 cables. I kind of just stuffed everything in there late last night so I didn’t spend anytime routing the cables. I will be disassembling the case to Stuff the excess cables into the rear partition. I think it’ll end up looking super clean. Obviously I have to mod the case to mount the gpu and the mount has play so it’s not hurting anything. But I’ll probably improve the gpu slot mount as well. This is my very first pc build, so not bad for a first attempt.

 

[JDragon]

This is my very first pc build, so not bad for a first attempt.

Wow! That's very impressive. You went for highest degree of difficulty on your first attempt.

 

[NastyNick]

The community taught me a lot in a really short time. I knew literally nothing two months ago, like the difference between a gpu and psu lol Thank you sff net! But obviously I’ve been working with wood for awhile, I have a furnishing business on the side.

 

[dumplinknet]

Great work. I love the effort. But some of the lines don't completely "line-up". It drives me nuts But hey I like that it's different.

It just my OCD can be strong some times.

 

[NastyNick]

Ya this was just a prototype and I stuffed everything in there quickly. I’m going to disassemble to reroute and clean up all the lines. The wood was a piece of scrap, so I didn’t have a choice on width and length of the stand.

I was originally doing this build without the stand by using a dynamo mini 200w psu and an external brick. But after calculating power consumption there was no way that would support even a mild OC. Not to mention cooling. Glad I went this route cause I was able to hit 4.9 GHz across all core and with the extra exhaust that was just at 70*C at 95 TDP. With a little over volt I probably will hit 5.0 without any temp issues. I’m happy