Mechex
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Thank You so much! You inspired me to finally get to it and finish it, I've been struggling to make some time for this project, but I'll work on it soon.
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Waterblock finally arrived today, it was the first time I had something stopped by customs. I initially wanted to do some progress in the meantime, but yeah, who was I kidding Anyway, this means I'm back at it and I don't want to take any long breaks before it's finished.
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Not bad! That should be a pretty simple rebuild though. I'm looking forward to see it finished!
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Welcome back! I did a lot of thinking and planning, and I realized I screwed up quite a bit. It was quite a knucklehead move and I could have avoided it easily. I ordered the wrong waterblock for the gpu, the one for the non Super version of the card. When I realized it I hoped it had the same pcb and it would fit, but mounting holes and VRM layout is different. I was even ready to have at it with a milling machine, but there is not enough meat to mill away without leaking. Crap. So now I have this useless waterblock for a card that no one is ever going to watercool and I need to burn money and wait who knows how long for another one. F*ck.
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@N3URAL you mean the thing that holds the side panel on? Yeah, I pulled it out, I will put it back once I'm done cutting up the case. I think I've seen an rx580 inside of one of these, it was fixed on the top of the mobo, so the gpu I/O bracket replaced the mesh part next to motherboard I/O. Altough I think a power supply might be a problem in your case, can the 240W handle rx580?
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Hello @N3URAL, thank you! I do have it roughly laid out in my mind, but it is going to be really tight. I don't even know yet if the amount of radiators I can put in is sufficient for the 2070S. It's a pretty efficient gpu though, if I used that vega 64 the pc would liquify
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So you might have noticed that while all sleeper sff builds revolve mainly around cooling, I have barely mentioned it. I think it's time we delve into the make or break of tiny but powerful systems. This case has only one 80mm fan position and no space for anything else. There is only one possible way for airflow (see picture below) which is down in the lower part of the case. But.. all the important parts are in the upper part of the case, that won't help at all! Well, looks like I need to transfer all that heat to the lower part of the case. What's the best way of transfering heat in pc? Yeah, that will be water. Also I really need the graphics card to be single slot to fit in there. Kinda sucks that I won't be using this beautiful cooler though.
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Look what arrived today! Definitely the biggest expense of this build by far. I will do some benchmarks to see how much of an upgrade is it going to be from vega64 and to find out if (or how much) it will be bottlenecked by my r5 2600 because, yeah... I'm kinda broke now
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Really? Nice! It's a beastly card indeed, not only in physical size, but in performance as well! (and power draw too ) According to tiers on this forum, I will be upgrading from tier A card to tier E, but the small, portable size takes some sacrifices.
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Today I turned on the psu and motherboard for the first time to check if they even work, update the bios, etc. and just for fun, this is the graphics card from my current rig performance wise it would probably be enough, but the damn thing is bigger than the entire case
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Actually, I think I could have made it even a little bit shorter, so it would fit closer to the former hdd bay. I need as short cables as possible, because they will be a mess and limit my airflow.
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It turned out pretty amazing! I am starting to realize how much of a pain will cable management be though...
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I mentioned that cable which needs some modification so here's the deal: This is the optical drive that came with the Optiplex. It's just a basic notebook type optical drive in a plastic closure. I intend to keep this thing intact and functional in my build as well. Mostly for keeping the sleeper convincing, but a couple of times it came in handy for me when doing archeological dig in my old data stash Turns out this thing has a funny connector on the back though. After some googling I found out this thing is called Slimline Sata. I found this conversion to molex, but that is quite inconvenient... That means another cable that I have zero space for. Unless... Could I make that molex go straight into the psu? Looks like I can! I hope it will work I have no idea how to shorten a Sata cable though...
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Hello @kkpatel87, thank you for your kind words! Of course, I am going to smooth out the interior of the case and paint it matte black. Some features still need to be cut out of there to fit all the stuff. I was going to do that next, but I can't go to the workshop now because of health issues. I still have one cable here that needs a little mod, so I think I can knock that out till the end of the week.
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Thank you! Of course, the knife doesn't necessarily have to be a Spyderco, it is my choice though I didn't think of adding solder there, but I figure it will be fine, because the manufacturer didn't bother either.
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Before you finish, check if your cables all ended up the same length. They should be close, but mine varied by like 2mm, so I trimmed the to the length of the shortest one. Now strip the ends and crimp your Terminals onto the cables. It's a little tricky to make them all the same length. To finish it off, stick those terminals into the plastic housing. Make bloody sure to get the right cable into the right hole. This doesn't matter much when you're just making cable extensions, but EVGA thought it would be funny to jumble them up. And just like that, the cable is finished! Feel free to make any suggestions on what could have been done better.
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This looks like a nice project! I don't know why Dell used so nicely made, high quality cases for cheap office prebuilds. I am looking forward to see how this turns out!
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Next up is the tricky part, but very essential one for nice cables, which is figuring out the actual cable length precisely. You only need to do this once, other cable lines can rely on one measurement, if it is correct. So put every potential obstacle for your cable in the case and route your cable exactly how you want it to be. Now proceed like you did when getting the approximation before, but trim the cable little by little until you are satisfied. Make sure to measure on the far end of the connector (like in the photo), because if you measure it perfectly for the near side, the far side will end up too short. Now trim all the cable lines to length, and now it is time to decide if you want your cable straight or curved. While curved cables hold their shape nicely, they can't be straightened and are harder to make, so I am going with straight cables, which means all the lines in the cable will be the same length. with curved ones you'll want to make lines inside of the curve a little bit shorter, but not more than 5mm (~1/4"). Having trimmed all the cable lines to the right length, now you can sleeve them. Take your paracord, cut the end off if frayed and cut the same length as the cable (like in the pic). I found that sharp knife cuts paracord with less fraying than scissors. Cable combs are useful in this stage for straightening out those cables. Now take out all seven white inner strands of paracord and burn the ends with your lighter just enough so they won't fray anymore, but not enough to crumble the opening, because the cable wouldn't fit through. You will get a feel for it after a couple tries. Then feed those hollow pieces of paracord over the cables, which I found surprisingly effortless. At this point you can install your cable combs, especially if you have those with holes instead of clips. The cable is finally looking kinda neat!
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A quick update, this little fella is turning out to be close to a 10 hour ordeal. Cable tutorial will be finished by the end of the week.
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So now that you have everything you need, you can proceed onto actually making the cables. First, you need to make sure you're not going to blow up your pc, so you need to make 100% sure you know the scheme of your cables, where each cable needs to go. These are usually standard, but I'd always rather check. For example, my ATX 24pin is not standard, because on the PSU side it splits into one 2x5pin and one 2x9pin. You can use a multimeter to check this, but I just stripped the big sleeve and traced them one by one. Make sure to lay it out on paper (or software), it's pretty easy to mess up. Second, you need to figure approximate length of your cables. This is just a very rough measurent, you'll make it perfect later. To do this, put your components inside the case, insert those plastic connector housings into the connectors, unwind some cable (don't cut yet) and route the end of the cable loosely from one connector to the other. Then kinda stick the end of the cable into the housing and approximate the right length, give a generous excess and cut. Great, now you have your reference length. Just to be clear, it needs to be a little longer than the real cable length. Next you need to prep your cables. Cut the reqiured amount of cables to the same length as your reference, strip like 5mm or 1/4 inch on one end and install your Copper Crimp Terminal on one end of each cable. Now your cables should look something like this: Now stick those terminals into the housing. You need to push on them pretty hard to get them in properly. Now you're left with something like this:
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The last very important thing you need is the right mindset. Remember, you will make less waste if you cut it oversized, rather than having to redo the whole cable because it is too short. If you are pretty sure it is long enough, add another inch and you will be fine. Overall though, most of the stuff used is very cheap, but shipping time is awfully long, (especially in these times) so make damn sure you have enough stuff even for some screw ups.
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- plastic connector housings, can be found as Mini-Fit, Molex or 5557 and pin layout, for example ATX 24pin is 2x12pin, CPU is 2x4 and so on. Warning: CPU 2x4 is not the same as GPU 2x4, I could only find those in the 6+2 version. If you're not sure, you can always check the shape of those pins on the top. In the next pic, the left one is GPU 2x4pin and the right is CPU 2x4pin. P.S.: These are usually sold by 10 pieces minimum for like 1,5 euros (~2 dollars), so you will have plenty for mistakes and maybe making some custom cables for a bunch of friends - paracord, we're getting into the nice to haves territory here, but if you're going through the trouble of making your own cables, you might as well make them look nice and sleeve them, right? The original paracord comes in insane amount of colors and color combinations, and cost of like 10-15 bucks for 30 meters (~90 feet) makes this the most expensive material you will use in this project. Feel free to settle for cheaper off-shore stuff, if they make the color you want. You need just a little bit more length of this than the cable, but the 30 meter package will totally have you covered for this project and you will still have some paracord left for other stuff, it comes in handy sometimes - cable combs, also really nice to have, because they really clean up those cables and make them straight. There are different types of these out there, I opted for these because they were nicely made (no sharp edges and moulding errors like the others I've seen) and I found the fact that you can take them on and off quite useful. You need just a few of these, I wouldn't use much more than 3-4 per cable, just again make sure to get the right pin layouts.
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Custom Cable Making 101 (from noob's perspective) First, you will need some basic tools: - crimping tool - sharp knife - cable cutter/stripper - lighter ...and some materials: - wires, as you can see I just gutted an old power cord off of something, you need quite a lot them, here is like 5 meters (~15 feet) and it is barely enough for my really short cables. Make sure to get something that is at least 1,5mm² or 16 gauge. - these things are what actually makes contact inside of the plastic connector housing, they can be found on aliexpress as 5556-RT Copper Crimp Terminals, keep in mind that you need 2 of these for each line of the cable, that's 48 of them just for the ATX 24pin. They're dirt cheap though.
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It is fine, I had literally months to come to terms with it and figure out a better way
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It wouldn't, because the looks, while being awful, isn't the biggest issue. The biggest issue is that I messed up cable lengths, so when one of them is taut, others are loose. Also it is too short anyway. Don't worry though, wires and sleeving will be reused for 24pin, because that one will be a lot shorter.
