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I have an idea for a custom built 'sleeper PC" where I use a "Bubble iMac", without the built-in screen of course, to house a full PC, including a DVD Drive, if I can find a laptop drive that's the same size, and compatible with the iMac cd-drive bezel, or close enough, to be juryrigged at least, with a little glue or something... My question is, if I want to go through with the idea, do I want to go with a CPU or an APU??? Also, how new do I want to go with the processor??? What I know for sure about the proposed build is that it would likely be a M-atx or M-itx board with either 8 or 16 Gb of ddr4 RAM, and that the newer you go on ryzen, the less power you consume, therefore the less heat you generate, in general, but I also know that a GPU would add a lot of heat to the system, and so I would probably want a older graphics card if I went with a dedicated GPU, probably a 10series Nvidia, unless I wanted to really use an AMD card... Any ideas of a good cheap motherboard and CPU combination, that would work, and possibly a GPU if you deem it necessary??? It doesn't need to be anything fancy, just something with built-in wi-fi, and an m.2 slot,(or 2) perhaps something from the ASUS "TUF" lineup, and an appropriate CPU... Motherboard doesn't necessarily have to be available right now, just needs to be in production, and selling a good amount of product... Picture of a case like mine is below (picture from wikipedia) .

https://www.amazon.com/SilverStone-Technology-SST-FN124-Design-3-Pins/dp/B07P989QSM/ref=pd_sbs_147_5/141-6296049-9850263?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=B07P989QSM&pd_rd_r=d14c515b-087c-4dff-b674-b444491e4daf&pd_rd_w=mLrhB&pd_rd_wg=SoPvV&pf_rd_p=ed1e2146-ecfe-435e-b3b5-d79fa072fd58&pf_rd_r=BZTNWXSV38JYT6A48BNS&psc=1&refRID=BZTNWXSV38JYT6A48BNS I was going to use one of these in a sleeper build I currently am piecing together, was wondering if anyone here has experience with these.

Using an old Enermax case. One criterion is that the removable drives must all work. The DVD RW and the Zip drive are ATAPI and connect with a PCI-E IDE card. The two floppies use a small floppy-to-usb adapter and plug in to the motherboard headers. It's built around a B550 motherboard with a Ryzen 7 5800X A video card suitable for Flight Simulator will be added when they become available at a reasonable price. When that happens I will revisit the cooling requirements.

Budget Aim: $2000 Budget total after Completion: $2263.20 Country: Australia (AUD) Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: General gaming including new and older titles with decent performance. Parts: Be Quiet! Pure Wings 80mm x3, Noctua NF-A12x25 12mm x1 Cooler Master Hyper 212x CPU cooler Cooler Master MWE 750W Power supply Seagate Barracuda 2TB HDD WD Green 3D NAND 240GB M.2 SATA SSD ASUS Tuf Gaming GeForce RTX 2060, 6GB G.Skill Trident Z RGB 32GB 3200MHZ DDR4 Intel I9 10850K, 3.6GHZ MSI MPG 2490 Gaming Edge WIFI Motherboard Unknown Beige Case Several fabricated brackets and some nuts and washers as well a standoff and screw kit Peripherals: MSI Optix MAG321CURV 4k 60hz ttesports Black V2 mouse Logitech G512 Carbon Tactile (soon to be an AKKO Silent 3108 Cherry MX Red to keep with the retro theme as much as I can) Project Constraints, Considerations and conclusions: After doing some research it was clear airflow and cooling was going to be a concern in an old style case. I chose the Hyper 212X as It was affordable and seemed to have good reviews. I've so far found it to be really good with the testing and usage of the system I've done so far as such I would highly recommend it for budget builders. Although this cases was designed to fix ATX Motherboards the mounting spots had square holes and only two center brass standoffs. After reading a forum post I almost used washers to combat this issue but didn't like the look and decided it would be too tedious and instead measured up and made two washer plates that riveted to the Mobo base I then tested fitted the Mobo marked mounting holes when aligned with the IO hole and drilled little holes for my standoffs and used small washers to step them out about 1mm. I also used little nuts on the back of the standoffs to secure them tightly In order to achieve decent exhaust flow I removed the two expansion slot covers on the top and bottom of my GPU. To allow room for the 120mm front fan and give more space for cable management the disk drive caddy was trimmed to only accommodate the disk drive that was then gutted and used as a HDD caddy. the CD Drive face clipped to the front and the tray shield was screwed to an inner lip. the audio jack and volume control are glued in place and non functional but the volume slider still spins. The Floppy disk drive is still completely assembled but not plugged in as I didn't want to deal with more cable management or finding out it doesn't work all together. While all the case buttons and lights are fully functional the HDD light plug was 3 pin and had to be cut down into two single pins with a razor blade making it difficult to plug in. In some of the photo's you will see that I mounted the CPU fan backwards!!!!! I quickly picked up on this and fixed it as those photos were taken. I would like to note that I'm aware that I could have added more floor fans. I didn't do this because the steel of this old case is thin and I didn't want to compromise the integrity too much. even when drilling the first fan I noticed a lot of flex. I understand its only the floor but keeping this hard to find case as original as possible was important to me. the bottom of the front panel has a gap as well as the small holes at the front. if down the track I find the cooling to be inadequate I will look into adding an additional exhaust fan and maybe another floor fan making both larger or even water cooling. I do have case fan filters coming in the mail but they didn't arrive on time so I will be adding them in the near future. Please take into consideration that I am still new to Pc building and did my best to build this computer. I really want to get some feedback on how I went. Build Description/ Explanation: I would like to start off by saying that this is actually my first ever attempt at building a pc and have been mostly a console gamer my whole life. I began gaming many years ago playing such games as aoe1, aoe2, Total Annihilation and Runescape as well as early sims titles. It wasn't long before I made the transition to PlayStation and have been primarily a console gamer since. After a brief stint owning Old Alienware M18x R2 Laptop my interest in pc gaming and gaming as a whole expanded and I soon found myself finding much to be desired with my old laptops performance (which was surprisingly good all things considered) and even the PlayStation hardware I was so familiar with. After some friends had also made the transition to Pc I was inspired to look into buying a much better system and then eventually convinced myself that in order to save money it would be a great idea to attempt building one. After some thought and reminiscing about the great times I spent playing old titles in my childhood and the old beige/white systems my family owned at the time I was inspired to build a new system that would preform excellently into one of these old towers. After many hours of late night research on various tech forums (including this one) and countless Linus Tech Tips YouTube videos I built up enough knowledge and confidence to start looking for a case and parts. which led me to my current tower that I found on eBay that is almost identical to the towers I was surrounded by at a young age. With a case that supports ATX form factor I was ready to get my parts and begin case mods to assemble the system. With a few clever mods some determination, concentration and basic DIY skill I was able to have all my cuts, gutting, drilling, painting (case floor is painted) and fans mounted in a day. this includes removing the old PSU cables and drives, cutting the drive tray mount down, gutting the disk drive to be used as a HDD caddy, Step drilling holes for floor fan, making and riveting plates for the Mobo mount tray as well as mount for the upper front fan all done in a day. the next day was spent test fitting the the Mobo then marking and drilling holes for the standoffs. With some trips to Bunnings (Australian hardware store) and a few hours later the Mobo was assembled and mounted and I began slowly mounting the rest of the parts and spent the rest of the night neatly labeling some wires and hiding spare plugs. on the Third and final day my cable management was done and I was ready for the first boot. Having read and watched many tech videos I was expecting to have some issues as I was aware that your supposed to test all your parts outside of the case first. I disregarded this advice as I don't have a test bench and didn't feel confident setting up parts on my table in my busy crowded living environment. To my surprise everything started and booted on the first button press without a single issue. I was quick to set up some basic overclocking (only to 4.0GHz as I will need to gain some experience and possibly update my cooling solution before pushing the i9 too hard) and play with my fans a little then installed windows followed by some drivers. I did some testing on Cinebench and used Speccy to monitor temps that I found to surprisingly good ( between 30-45°C at idol and between 55-65°C under load for about and hour). Finally I installed the highly anticipated first game. That game being aoe1 definitive edition. At the time of writing this that was the only game I've played as I suffer from the notoriously bad condition known as Australian Internet. I thoroughly enjoyed going back to the basics and cannot wait to get some newer more demanding games installed and see how they run as well as continue learning and building on the system as time goes on. Please give me feedback and constructive criticism and enjoy the build photos. Build Updates: Tuesday, 5 January 2021, Added another front intake and a lower rear intake fan that has greatly improved cooling. Both rear fans (exhaust and intake) are a Noctua NF-A8 80mm fan while the be quiet fan was relocated to the front.

Budget (including currency): not too expensive$ us Country:US Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: gaming and streaming Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): all the original parts are still there. I would also like to keep the burner drive with the sleeper build

Budget (including currency): Current build cost is $2275.71 USD; this is more or less a long term build so budget is not a concern Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: OBS, streamlabs obs, Steam, CS:GO, Rainbow Six Siege, Spotify, Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): Just looking to see if anyone knows about any extensions and adaptors for this ribbon cable so I can hook up the power button to the motherboard. Currently using any information I have from the user guides for both the original computer and motherboard.

Budget (including currency): around $1300 USD Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mostly music production with Ableton 11, will be recording instruments in and using lots of plugins. Also maybe some light gaming (games like Plate-Up, Vampire Survivors, maybe emulation as well.) Other details already have a Windows key and an old tower (ATX) I'm currently making modifications to. This being my first PC I'm largely just guessing on what parts I need, and I have no idea what parts are ideal for music production as a main function. Here is a tentative parts list: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/machugamusic/saved/# Hopefully that link works. Planning on purchasing parts soon after Xmas, any advice is greatly appreciated! Will add a picture of the tower as it is now. I cut out a hole at the top for more ventilation and am going to put a mesh in still and potentially more venting, planning on putting a fat fan in the front instead of any drives in the drive bay area. If any more info is needed I will happily try to provide!

I am building a Sleeper inside an HQ45PRO. Why? Because I need a gaming PC an I am old! Also I really liked these case back then with the blue segments. The idea is to make everything functional (diskdrive, CD-Rom Drive, etc) with the new insides. I found this New Old Stock cardreader that is going in there for sure. Also I've found some DVD-RW drives. The black one is Sata, and the whiteone Pata, so I hope I can change the fronts or something. TLDR: - Build video is now here:

Hey everyone! Im new here and have a few questions / looking for your opinions on how I should finish this mod project. I recently bought a Gateway 2000 Performance system from Ebay and gutted it. After hours of Dremel work I cut the new motherboard IO hole, Did some small cable management locations on the inside and Had to unfortunately tinker with the PSU slot and cut away a small amount but it all fits and is working! This system is rocking: Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z270X-Ultra Gaming CPU: Intel Core i5-7600K 4.6ghz Water cooled by: Corsair H60 Graphics Card: GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2060 Gaming OC Pro 6G RAM: HyperX FURY 12GB DDR3 (1866MHz) Storage: (2) SSD's @ 250gb each + a HDD PSU: 630 wat corsair or something similar i forget lmaoo Anyway my questions here are what is the best way to repaint or recolor the case? Im wanting to get the classic 2000 beige white back. Currently the front cd drive is the only thing with the classic color still on it. The rest has turned to a yellowish tint. The side panels are full metal while the front panel is just a hard plastic. I also am looking to purchase front USB / Card readers / Fan controller units later but all the models online are in black so I will have to repaint them as well. Below are WIP photos don't judge the duct tape on the front xD. All responses and reply's are appreciated!

I built a sleeper pc, after I saw an old case at my in-laws and fell in love with the idea and so yeah. It cost me roughly about $600, but really happy and content with it.

hello, I've been planning a sleeper build, no RGB, no fancy features, not even a case window, so I found this extremely old coolermaster case. https://www.newegg.com/global/jo-en/black-cooler-master-elite-350-atx-mid-tower/p/N82E16811119269 (it's actually the same case linus recommended for entry level budget in 2015), Would this case be able to handle a ryzen 7/5 for processor and something like a 2060 or 5700 for graphics, pc part picker didn't flag any incompatibilities and the wattage seems to be just enough from the included power supply. But I'm not sure about airflow and if the GPU would fit in it. Thank you,

Hello, this is my first post, and my first non standard PC I built. But my 2.5th PC build. 0. Preface I always wanted to do a sleeper build, but never found a case, which I could work in. Originally, I wanted to try an IBM PS2 or PC 330, but those would require extensive reworks to get anything fitted inside. But then I remembered the other old PCs used in school. Those Fujitsu Siemens computers with a transparent green fronts. A quick search revealed some expensive and heavily used systems all over the world. And after some browsing trough eBay, I found one in almost perfect condition for a reasonable price. Untested of course. For my use, untested is fine. And after delivery, it didn't boot. And I didn't want to mess around with that as I really only wanted it for my sleeper build. I still have the Siemens parts and will give them to my old PC tinker friend. For Hardware, I just use what I currently had as my main PC. Also, the Maxwell are supposedly the last highend GPUs by NVidia with DVI-I for direct VGA access. Old Spec: Siemens Scenic 661 Intel Pentium III @ 500MHz 64MB SDRAM/100 Matrox Millenium G200 LE 8MB 4.3GB HDD 40x CD-ROM 3.5" FDD Windows NT Workstation 4.0 New Spec: Asrock Killer X99m Intel i7 5820K @ 3.5GHz 32GB DDR4 / 2300 EVGA Geforce Titan X Superclocked 12GB Samsung XP941 250GB m.2 SSD Intel SSD 750 400GB PCIe WD Red 6TB Blu-ray / DVD / CD-ROM Card Reader and USB Picture shows computer after successfull procedure. 1. Taking a look inside After opening it up. There was not much in it. But such cleanliness... 2 slot Harddrive bay and cone PC speaker Testfit Seems to fit. Or does it? 2. Trimming down I knew the PCIe power for the GPU will be a problem, and first I thought the EVGA Powerlink L-Bracket may help. But I only have about 10mm clearence. But after some quick search engine shenigans, I found out I could clip off some plastic and bend the cables away. Not pretty, but practical. 3. preliminary cooling There is so little airflow in this case. I mounted a fan at the ISA card holders to draw some cool air for the GPU. The CPU is currently out of luck. But Idle temperatures hover around the 60°C mark, incl some internet browsing and YouTube consumption. But starting anything slightly demanding, GPU and CPU go up to 80°C. There will be thermal throtteling eventually. 4. Next steps To improove cooling, I'll need to cut or drill holes in the currently still 100% stock case. I thought of installing a 240mm AIO unit with the rad mounted on the GPU side as an intake. And a fan to vent the mainboard around the GPU. That should drop temperatures drastically. Just need to find a mounting solution for the rad.