I want a case in a fun shape and this is the best layout I can come up with that fits the build volume of my 3d printer.
There are 20mm tall rubber feet on the bottom allowing air to enter through the bottom. 4 hard drives are in a cage off to the left and spaced with 16 mm gaps between them.
The air flows through them l and pulls heat from the open gap in the front as well as past the edges of the GPU. There is a 140mm fan in the rear sucking it out.
At the top is an SFX power supply pulling air out of the top of the case and venting it out back.
There are no openings on the face or sides.
I’ve had to make changes as one of the goals it to use as many locally-sourced parts as I can, so most replacements can be sourced in a day, reducing downtime. That’s limiting on some ways but there is a microcenter nearby so it’s not that bad.
My concern here is the cooling might not be adequate. I was considering adding a fan just for the hard dries and ducting them to pull their air from the bottom too but that would contract from the available air intake for the rest of the components. I could duct the drives to part of the rear fan so it pulls part from the drive cage area and part from the rear of the case, but that could reduce cooling for the GPU since there’s less room to pull hot air from around it.
It’s a home media server but it might see some transcodes and game streaming use too so I put a 3 slot GPU in there to force me to accommodate such a thing while designing it. I also want to release this when I’m done so others might be able to use it too, which means I need to accommodate heavier uses with bigger CPU and GPU cooling needs.
I’m not entirely convinced this will cool effectively. Am I overthinking this?
I think you’re going to have a problem keeping your power supply floating in the air like that
AirPower is a thing and my CAD image proves it!
I’m sorry, but what I’m guessing is the PSU just floating like that, makes it look like it’s ready for some sort of wrestling move.
Are those mechanical hard drives? If so, I would want a fan moving air across them. Also keep in mind that most filament is not ESD safe.
The openings under them and the spacing between them is to allow air to be pulled through them.
I was concerned about the filament and ESD too but have been told the motherboard would just ground out to the PSU through the power connector and not to worry about it. Since the hard drives are also connected I figured they would ground out the way too. There is ESD safe filament I could use for the drive cage though.
Just looking to learn, who told you that?
I don’t know, someone online, I remember arguing the exact same thing about 3-D printed computer cases being a bad idea because of static concerns,but I was basically mauled in the comment section for it
Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXkgbmr3dRA
Oof, moving plastic filament rubbing on plastic guides. Sounds like static waiting to happen.
I never thought of that.
I don’t know much about static electricity and plastic, but would it be sufficient to ground off an arbitrary point in the case to the body of the PSU?
I’d recommend using conductive filament if you can or even just coating it with conductive paint before it touches anything electrically sensitive might do the trick. It doesn’t have to be a great conductor, just a tiny bit of conductivity will prevent any significant static charges from building up.
It would not. Static electricity in insulators such as plastic is localized. It can’t move across the plastic to the grounding point.
Noice!! I cannot offer much knowlegde here, but I’ll be cheering in the background for your endeavours. I’m actually in the wishful stage of a similar project; I got 3 old (intel duo) computers I’d like to (somehow) merge into one massive server. And I’d like to make my own case as well. So I’d love to learn from your wisdom
Which CAD software are you using btw?
If build volume is a limitation, I’ve seen all sorts of snap together plates you could crib from. For example I recently printed this pacman boardgame. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:5396911
The interlocks are completely hidden by the overhangs of the other plates. Once snapped together, you can’t see that it is made of separate parts.
Seems fun, but is this case really gonna sit somewhere you actually see it? That seems awfully noisy when you add a few hard drives.
