Scott_Paladin

Fantastic. Love what you've done here.

Drilled the mounting holes for the new fan bracket today and shortened some fan cables. Unfortunately, I seem to have burned the fan on my Noctua cpu cooler. I've got a cheap 92mm fan in its place, but the fucker is loud. I've already ordered a couple of replacements and maybe tinker with the old one; I think it might just be a bad wire. Now I'm waiting on some more 3D printed parts (nylon, so can't use my local guy), but I've got enough now to do the most "complete" put together and run it while I wait.

After another amazingly quick turnaround from my local 3D printer shop, I got my latest revision of the fan bracket tonight. In order to fit everything in, I had to go back down to just two fans. My initial heat tests were with two so I should still be ok. The cabling is getting pretty cramped; it might be prudent to shorten the fan cables. Anyway, onto a could of pics. Need to drill and tap the mounting holes and do a little light sanding but that will wait for the morning.

I need a bracket to hold the 60mm fans in place. My first attempt was a small L-shaped section of aluminum sheet, but it was a bit flimsy. Attempt number 2 was larger, built for 3 fans, but I bungled it's execution something awful. So I decided to slap together something in 123D Design and send it off for a test print. Pics below: So onto attempt #4. There are a couple of options here: try hand cutting another aluminum part, redesign the 3D printed part and sacrifice a fan to allow for clearance, or maybe go looking for someone who can C&C cut a small piece of sheet for me without it costing an arm and a leg.

Work continues on the Paladin NES. I've been trying to find a color match for the darker grey of the case, so that it wouldn't jar with the buttons, but to no avail. I think I'm going to have to paint them to match, but that will require sourcing or making some new labels. I did get the motherboard standoffs installed and a access port cut for if I ever need to get to the SSD. This will need a cover of some sort, but my recent misadventures in metalwork have me a bit gun shy on making one by hand. Exploring laser cutting or 3d printing as a solution. If anybody can point me at a rattle can that's a good color match to the original dark grey of the NES, I'd appreciate it.

I am full of envy.

The old Nintendo system board didn't need nearly as much air as even my modest modern components do. So I'm definitely going to need some ventilation. I could have drilled large holes and then covered them with some sort of grill, but that felt like it would make the NES look "modded". I really want to keep this thing looking like its possibly stock. Obviously I'm going to need to make changes, but I want them to be the sort of thing that "well, maybe it just like that". The end results are pretty satisfactory. Off camera I repeated this whole procedure on the opposite side as well. The hope is that the GPU fans can draw air in through these holes, and the exhaust fans on the other side will pull the hot air around and out. I have another batch or two of photos still sitting on my camera, so hopefully another update is to follow soon.

When it's done, you will!

Not long after the first fit, I fabbed up a simple - maybe even crude - panel to hold the switches and power LED.

I know these things have been done before and by people better at this than I, but that's a terrible reason not to do something cool. The real impetus for me was finding some digital photos of a similar build I did a decade and a half ago. (Album here) I was pretty damn proud of this thing when I was a wee boy, but looking back the overwhelming though was: I could do so much better now. Shortly afterward, the new low profile 1050 Ti was announced by MSI, and in quick succession I found ungreedy's build here on these very forums. After that, there was no hope; I was going to build my own. So another guy is going to build a another PC into another Nintendo Entertainment System. Let's talk hardware real quick. This isn't meant to be a monster. It's going to be small. It will hopefully be quiet. Frankly, it's going to go right into an entertainment system like the old NES was. This will be a couch gamer. Nothing crazy. Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-H170N-WIFI CPU: Intel i5-6500T CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-L9I RAM: Ballistix Sport LT 8GB DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) x 2 SSD: Intel 600P PCI-E 240GB VGA: MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti DLP Fan: Fractal Design Silent R2, x 2 or 3 PSU: 160w Pico PSU All of this has been purchased and is already in my bin of parts. Choices here were determined as much by my constraints as anything else. I'm using a T series Intel chip in part because I'm a bit worried about heat, and in part because I found a good deal on eBay. There's a bit of thermal headroom with the cooler, but not so much on my PSU. I have a higher watt DC-DC board that I could move to if need be, but that comes with some cabling woes that I'm hoping to avoid at the moment. That SSD doesn't provide a ton of room either, but it's small form factor more than makes up for it. If I can still with the smaller PSU, than a larger 2.5" drive could be added to gain some local storage as well. The NES doner was specifically purchased as a DOA "for parts" box. I needed decent plastic, but none of the guts. The circuit board and other internals were not in working order when I acquired this unit, so I don't have any guilt about binning a working unit. I am also, regrettably, no the most conscientious about taking a bunch of in progress photos. In fact, this post is stepping in well into the build. I'm going to post everything that's already digital, but even that's a bit behind. Anyway, let's get to the good stuff. There's been plenty of work since this initial fit, so more to come.