advice needed on scratch built
Posted: Tue Jan 03, 2012 10:49 am
Hi All.
I'm designing and building a case for my pc to cater for my particular requirements in the living room.
I've recently built an AV area under my stairs in the living room that houses a TV, amp, blu/ray, sat, xbox..... anyway you get the picture. My HTPC has always been in a normal pc case sitting next to my unit, but in a bid to streamline our living room I have decided to get rid of the case and build it into the false wall I made behind the TV. Extreme I know but this computer serves well for me with 6tb of films/music with decent pc gaming and having a normal HTPC case or putting it in another room is not an option for me.
Ive cut a whole as you can see in the picture ready to install said computer case. Once the TV is in front you should not see or hear the pc on.
I've got these plans for my design as you can see, it will be predominantly made of MDF with some plastic/aluminium bits and a recycled motherboard tray stripped from an old case. It won't be pretty, but that's not a problem as it won't be on show.
The orientation is that it pulls cool air from the bottom of the case tunnelling it through compartments and expelling hot air out the top. I've designed the compartments to allow better thermal reduction letting me fine tune the fans best for efficiency/sound. As we all know heat rises and there shouldn't be any thermal pockets.
Although not shown the hard drive rig will be suspended on a bungee system but still letting air pass through.
There will be a usb optical drive in the cabinet and a remote power switch hdd activity light. Also I will have a usb hub in the cabinet for future connections.
Case with lid off showing the direction of air flow
With lid on
Anyway with what I have proposed in my design does anyone see a glaringly obvious problem or tips to make it more efficient/quiet? I do plan to put in 140mm fans in the future, but 120's will have to do for now
Also I have a palit gtx 460 with the standard heatsink. I was hoping to find a heatsink that could go 90 degress to the gpu which would be much more effecient with cooling. Does anyone know of such a thing, if not what are my other options? So far I have thought of using a standard cpu heatsink so that it would jut out increasing the surface area of cooling. I'm not too worried about it covering expansion slots.
Thanks for reading my rambles
I'm designing and building a case for my pc to cater for my particular requirements in the living room.
I've recently built an AV area under my stairs in the living room that houses a TV, amp, blu/ray, sat, xbox..... anyway you get the picture. My HTPC has always been in a normal pc case sitting next to my unit, but in a bid to streamline our living room I have decided to get rid of the case and build it into the false wall I made behind the TV. Extreme I know but this computer serves well for me with 6tb of films/music with decent pc gaming and having a normal HTPC case or putting it in another room is not an option for me.
Ive cut a whole as you can see in the picture ready to install said computer case. Once the TV is in front you should not see or hear the pc on.
I've got these plans for my design as you can see, it will be predominantly made of MDF with some plastic/aluminium bits and a recycled motherboard tray stripped from an old case. It won't be pretty, but that's not a problem as it won't be on show.
The orientation is that it pulls cool air from the bottom of the case tunnelling it through compartments and expelling hot air out the top. I've designed the compartments to allow better thermal reduction letting me fine tune the fans best for efficiency/sound. As we all know heat rises and there shouldn't be any thermal pockets.
Although not shown the hard drive rig will be suspended on a bungee system but still letting air pass through.
There will be a usb optical drive in the cabinet and a remote power switch hdd activity light. Also I will have a usb hub in the cabinet for future connections.
Case with lid off showing the direction of air flow
With lid on
Anyway with what I have proposed in my design does anyone see a glaringly obvious problem or tips to make it more efficient/quiet? I do plan to put in 140mm fans in the future, but 120's will have to do for now
Also I have a palit gtx 460 with the standard heatsink. I was hoping to find a heatsink that could go 90 degress to the gpu which would be much more effecient with cooling. Does anyone know of such a thing, if not what are my other options? So far I have thought of using a standard cpu heatsink so that it would jut out increasing the surface area of cooling. I'm not too worried about it covering expansion slots.
Thanks for reading my rambles