PS2 fat-boy PC

ebithril · December 29, 2016

So right now I'm planning a bit of a special build I'm planning on building a powerful PC in a PS2 fat-boy case. For me it would be a perfect build being both a smaller build and a nostalgic feeling, I'm also considering some customizing of the OS when the build is done so it really feels like booting up a PS2. The plan is to only mod the bottom and the back of the case on the outside so it looks like a real PS2 at first glance.

A bit of background to the plan to get some context on why and how it has evolved. The first plans where hatched when AMD released it's APUs and Valve had just revealed SteamOS (we didn't know it was going to be so bad ) and me and a friend thought that a PS2 would be the ultimate media center box to have in the living room and stream games to. Then AMD released the R9 nano, and our first thought was this should be small enough to fit in a PS2, but moving and starting to study made it impossible to afford and the plans where never executed. So right now I'm getting closer and closer to graduating and getting a job and I have to get a new PC as I'm right now sitting on a fx-8120 and a radeon 7870 1gb no SSDs in the system either so it's more or less painfully slow. So I started to look at what is exist right now I mean they can cram in a 1080 in a laptop so at least a 1070 in a PS2 should be doable and Gigabyte came to rescue they have a 1070 mitx model (https://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5923#kf) the biggest problem after fitting a graphics card is getting a PSU in there but here picoPSUs exist and two 160w should do the trick (http://www.mini-box.com/picoPSU-160-XT). Now another problem is cooling and a PS2 fat-boy only has an internal heigth of 7cm so getting aircoolers for both CPU and GFX will be really hard so I'm planning on watercooling using slim fans and slim radiators instead in theory I should be able to get the height of that to be 37mm using a 25mm thick radiator and a 12mm thick fan but I've heard that the 12mm fans out there is shit so this is really where I need help from the community here, is there anyone using slim fans for watercooling and is it good enough? What slim fans and radiators are you guys using? I'm also looking for as slim as possible motherboards with both a M.2 slot and a PCIE slot. And if anyone knows of a slim DVD or BluRay device that would be great since that would make it possible for the case to have all the features of a normal PS2 which would in my mind make the build more complete. Also I think that doing this build with soft tubing would be impossible as it would kink but if anyone have any ideas around this please share, I also think that using fittings instead of bending the harline tubing would take up less space as the bends could be sharper but if anyone have data suggesting otherwise I would be happy as it would make the build a bit cheaper.

TL;DR I would need some help finding slim fans, radiators, motherboards (itx) and DVD or BluRay device. I also wan't some help deciding between hard and soft tubing and in the case of hard tubing wheter bending or fittings would take up less space. I will update the thread with some drawings explaining my ideas when I get back home to my real computer as my laptop can't really do sketch up sketches.

porina · December 29, 2016

Sounds like a challenge. First up, you will need further research on the PicoPSU. I tried a mod using one before, and the problem with the PicoPSU is the total power is spread over 12/5/3.3V rails, and the 12V rail isn't very powerful. If you look in the manual, it is only rated for 8A continuous which is 96W.

A 1070 is rated at 150W, which will be split between the PCIe connector which you don't get with a PicoPSU, and the mobo connector. However, you also only have 96W on the 12V rail going to the mobo... the CPU itself is mostly fed off the 12V rail, so I can't see driving both that and the PCIe connector to a high power simultaneously.

If you know your electronics, you're probably better off using a regulated external 12V power brick (or two) to directly feed the CPU 4/8 pin connector and PCIe GPU connectors, and only using the PicoPSU to switch that on and off. You probably will need a flex riser anyway to connect the GPU, and it may be an alternate idea to put a separate 12V feed on that to take the load off the mobo slot.

As a suggestion, you might have to consider lower power components to ease powering the thing. On the plus side, this would also make it easier cool it... for comparison, the single PicoPSU system I tried before consisted of an i3-4150T (35W) and 750Ti (60W). I was probably right on the limit of the 12V rail of the PSU if both were under full load at the same time...

ebithril · December 29, 2016

Interesting that the power is split that way with the picoPSU as it says on the website that it only operates at 12v which was why I thougth that two of them would work, I've alos been thinking about modding a SFX PSU or just having it one the outside the problem with an SFX one on the inside is that if that is on the inside there is no way to fit anything more than that a motherboard and a Graphics card, however if I can make some nice looking cable going into the PS2 from the SFX PSU then I could use that on the outside. I was planning on using a PCIe riser for the 1070 connection just forgot to mention that in the original post.

Edit: Reading the manual for the picoPSU you are exaclty correct in how it is split up and the max rated output for the 12V is 8A which is indeed a problem, I'll look into running an external SFX psu though that would be ugly, modding an SFX psu to take up less space by removing the fan and instead going with an overkill PSU so it shouldn't be a problem, and also looking into as you said directly feed the GPU from an external 12V powerbrick, I myself ain't the best at electronics but I know people that should know enough to help me get it done if I decide that that is the way to go.