Servus

Welcome back to my blog :)

Today I wanted to show you how I created my own PC-Case.
To be honest I started planning 6 Weeks ago and haven't totally finished the build yet.
Nevertheless I can show you my thought processes on planning the whole thing.

How it started

I have always loved to watch casemodding videos and loved the fact that you can create something epic and good looking on your own.
The first thing I modified, was who guessed it, my first PC-Case. To be honest it didn't turn out well :). I tried to make my own side panel out of acrylic glass.
My 14 years old me thought it would be a great idea to remove the protective wrap from the glass before cutting it. Resulting in the whole thing full of scratches.
Then I glued that in with hot glue and it looked like s**t. I tried saving it with a sticker bomb design. But gave up after 5 stickers, because I didn't have any more.
Sadly I have no pictures, but here is a kitten.

Some time later I started looking at my XboX and decided to give it a go. And finally I managed to get my first good looking casemod going.

And now 2018 its finally time to not only mod a case, but to create a complete new one.

What I wanted

I saw some videos for wall mounts on youtube and quite liked them.
The only problem I had was the sheer size of the thing.
Way to big if you ask me.
Some other cases I had a look at where the super teensy tiny builds.
So I decided to make my build a hybrid based on both.

The Boxmount

The best name I can think of for that hybrid is "Boxmount".
Why, you ask?
Well, because it is a box with the mainboard mounted on it.
The powersupply and all the drives are stored inside the box and the mainboard and graphic card are mounted ontop.
The clue is to use a PCIe riser and mount the graphic card sideways. That will present it in a very nice and low profile manner. You will see what I mean by that later.

Sketching it all out

With the basic idea of what I want. I started to get some modeling going.
I installed SketchUp and just jumped right into it.

And that's what turned out. The mainboard gets mounted ontop of the box. Underneath the motherboard is a thin layer of acrylic glass, because I want to add some LEDs to the mix.
After some days of letting that set.
I decided that I really don't want a big CPU heat sink. The graphic card is nice and flat but the CPU heat sink rises up like a skyscraper. Not what I intended to build.
So I got my hands dirty again and Sketched some more ideas Up.

And that's what I came up with.
Now I am using a Wakü or closed water loop to cool the CPU and I realised my GPU is way bigger than the one I had in the previous SketchUp
After letting that set for some time, I decided that its the one I want to build.

To be continued

So now that I knew what I want, it was time so get started with some sort of prototype.
But that will be the topic for my next blog post. So stay tuned.