Is the NCASE N1 as small as it gets? Nope! (Mockup)

Pedex · March 10, 2015

When I first saw the NCASE M1, my jaw fell to the ground.

It looked good, was super compact, and could house some beastly components.

After getting a little curious about how compact is actually could get before running completely out of space.

I made a mockup of the M1 in sketchup, and started building from there.

After putting in components and packing as many of them as close as possible, I realized it could, in fact, get just a bit smaller.

I wanted to use full-size components (SFX PSU counts here) to make it as desktop-like as possible, like the M1.

This is the design i came up with:

Its not a huge difference, and internally it is very similar to the M1.

I even managed to fit a 120mm radiator, 3x 2.5" SSDs and 2x 3.5" harddrives. Pretty snazzy if you ask me.

Only thing left is to make the model more detailed, and maybe even add a slim fan somewhere, otherwise it would cook itself.

Crafting this at home should not be that difficult or expensive.

That might be a project for some other day!

Enderman · March 10, 2015

you could make it smaller by using 2.5" drives instead of 3.5" drives and using half length GPUs like the 970 which would save a lot of space while performing the same

SonoDanshi · March 10, 2015

Airflow is always going to be your biggest enemy when you get down to these ultra compact m-itx builds. One thing I believe would be essential though is a completely custom set of PSU leads. They'd have to be cut exactly to size otherwise they will take up too much space and restrict what little air flow you can generate.

Very intrigued to see just how far people can push this sort of thing though.