The impracticable

Mtbjonny · April 24, 2020

Hi everybody - first time writing to the forum, but long time viewer!

My old computer was dying. It was part NAS server, part desktop and all sad.

So as a gift to myself over Christmas I decided to get a new desktop. I looked at a few and there are some good ones out there. But none of them were really interesting to me.

I know that what’s most important about a computer is the specs. The speed, the feed, the Gigahertz and the Megaflopz. The expandability, the usability, the functionality.

But I’m going to have to look at for years to come, so I wanted something I enjoyed looking at. I could stuff it in a corner, but that seemed to defeat the purpose of buying something..

So I decided to build my own. I’d always thought vintage stereo cabinets were nice pieces of furniture, so I decided to buy a second hand one and see if I could retrofit it into a computer.

Here are a few fun things I learned from this project:

You can repair wood veneer with superglue. Who knew?
Wireless charging goes thru wood (as long as it’s thin enough).
Birch is a pain to stain evenly.
Paper bag material is kinda like 2000 grit sandpaper… kinda.
I could listen to this guy talk about restoring furniture for hours on end.
Watercooling the X570 chipset is a must for silent operation.
You can polish polyurethane to a shine with buffing pads and car polish.
Watercooling looks amazing but is totally not worth it otherwise.
Corsair’s RGB lighting system uses proprietary connectors. I hate proprietary connectors..
My patience has limits