SFF Build Plans

Calibos

Planning a SFF Gaming and Rendering build at the mo. Took my inspiration from the new Mac Pro 2013 and Custom builders.

Started playing around in Sketchup to arrange parts to see how small I could make it and downloaded a 30 day trial of Indigo Renderer to render it.

Turns out its the exact size of a Chrome Bin I have.

It would be quite small at 240mm(10") diametre and about 450mm(18") tall

It would include an ITX mobo, i7 4670K, GTX580, ATX 500W PSU, CPU & GPU Watercooling with 2x 60mm Thick 120mm Rads, 2.5" Hotswap SSD & HDD.

It looks huge beside the actual Mac Pro 2013 but thats because that thing is tiny!!

I'd be Vaccum Heat Molding Acrylic Sheet and covering in Two Way mirror Polorized self adhesive Vinyl. With an LCD display shining through and visible through the case.

Its a long way off (Might wait till Skylake) but thought I would post the results of my playing around with Sketchup nonetheless.

Serephucus

Looks nice. Very interested to see where this goes. I have a Z77E-ITX I'm looking to get rid of if it's of any interest to you.

Calibos

Serephucus wrote: »

Looks nice. Very interested to see where this goes. I have a Z77E-ITX I'm looking to get rid of if it's of any interest to you.

Thanks for the offer Serephucus but as this is on the back burner till funds allow. The more pressing need is for the upgrade to the family media server from 2 Dlink DNS323 Nas' to the case pictured below. Much further along on this as I already bought the Corsair Air 540 case and the Obsidian 900D Hotswap HDD bays. Room for 29x 3.25" Hdds in this.

BloodBath

Great idea. Keep us updated.

That media server case is a beast.

How long did it take you to make the renders?

Calibos

BloodBath wrote: »

Great idea. Keep us updated.

That media server case is a beast.

How long did it take you to make the renders?

As soon as I saw the Corsair Air540 cube case a few months ago, I immediately thought, "Server!!".

The case is designed to have the Mobo, GPU's, Lots of fans or Water-cooling Rads and fans on the left side of the case pictured above. The PSU, cables, Water-cooling Reservoir etc are usually hidden away on the thinner right-hand side of the case with a non windowed side panel.

I saw the potential to fit a lot of HDD's on the left side instead. I priced a lot different models of Hotswap bays but they were silly money until I saw the hotswap bays that come with the Corsair Obsidian 900D monster case. I came across a 10% discount code for Corsair.Com on reddit to celebrate their attendance at CES2014 and so ordered nine of the bays and hotswap back panels for the bays. Cost me nearly €300 but thats actually cheap for the amount of bays. I also wanted to use Corsair parts as I am more likely to get sponsorship for the build from them.

Because I don't need a GPU for this machine the clearance on the other side of the case isn't an issue. I just need to drill out some rivets and flip the central divider that the motherboard mounts to. I'll use a lower profile cpu Heatsink too as the i5 4560S won't be taxed too hard. Its actually the CPU in my Bedroom PC atm that I am rendering on and that things being cooled...and not too loudly either by an OEM intel fan cooler. I also need to fabricate a custom back panel of course.

This will be going in the Living Room which is usually only occupied by my half deaf father so fan noise shouldn't be an issue but I do anticipate this being a reasonably quiet aircooled PC anyway.

I'll be running Flexraid for drive pooling on WHS2011 on a Hyper-V VM along with a MySql DB for shared XBMC library and eventually NetDVR software for the future 1080p security cams for our home and business premises. Then an openelec VM for an XBMC instance for that room and a Win7 VM for my dads computer usage.

As for the modeling and renders. Surprisingly simple despite the fact that I have only started learning Sketchup. I just downloaded the case and part models from the 3D warehouse and positioned them/joined them together myself. Made the HDD caddy models myself from scratch though. I downloaded the Indigo Renderer plugin from the 3D extension warehouse part of Sketchup and without instructions but with a lot of stuff left on default settings and a bit of playing around with the controls, the above is the result. Most of the work is in the Sketchup modelling and then just picking and applying material types to the surfaces of the model in Indigo before clicking "Render".

From beginnbing to end on all the pictures I posted was just a few hours work yesterday. I let them render about an hour each.

Calibos

Just finished another render. I've a feeling the Corsair 600T case model isn't quite to scale. I think its a bit taller in real life. Heres the Air540 with the Mac Pro 2013 mod and I can say the scale is definitely correct as the chrome bin I based my model size on is the same size compared to the air 540 in reality as it is in the model.



Having so much fun with this. I'm about to start modelling/rendering the case from the opposite corner to show the back panel and arrangement of mobo, PSU etc on the other side of the case.

Calibos

Hehe. Talking to my cousin about this on FB just there and he jokingly said its vapourware until he see's some metal, plastic and silicon. Told him I have the metal and plastic and am still deciding on silicon. He demanded photo evidence so I took a crappy iPhone pic for him.

Serephucus

Fuuuuuuuuuck me that's a lot of hard drives.

Do you really need space for 27?

Calibos

Household of 7, all with their own favourite shows and movies. Already have 10 drives of varying size to go into it. Will probably fill the other bays over the course of the next 2-3 years before I start swapping out the smaller legacy drives to make more room. I'm thinking long term Yo!

Hehe. Imagine it with a full complement of 4TB HDD's. 116TB !!

Had to lift it to move it to take the photo for the cousin. Forgot how heavy the thing is just with the caddies inside. Imagine what it'll be like with a full complement of 3.25" HDD's, the PSU and the rest!!

It's how I thought up the build name for my build log over on OCN.

Density³

Density 'Cubed'....

Serephucus

And here was me thinking I had lots of server space with 18TB...

Calibos

Serephucus wrote: »

And here was me thinking I had lots of server space with 18TB...

We've 6TB in 2 old Dlink DNS323 Nas's and then 2TB of content in each of 3 Desktops in the house. Pain in the arse of those PC's are off when you want to access the content stored on them. Have 2x legacy 750GB & 1x 1TB drives to move into the new server as well.

Purchase a few more 2-4TB drives and we can really start going to town ripping the family bluray collection to HQ 1080P rips.

Its not excessive in terms of Storage or Cost when one realises its a family of 7 purchasing the Blurays, using it and paying their share for it. I'm just just the System Builder and Sys Admin for the family Network

Serephucus

Have you thought about redundancy at all for this?

Calibos

Assorted extended family and friends are my off-site backup

Theres always ways of acquiring re-rips by other means if something disastrous happened. I certainly won't spend months ripping more than once thats for sure!!

Will probably use multiple parity drives with Flexraid so the drive failure tolerance amount is higher. Have only had one drive failure in 15 years of computing. What are the odds of more than two drives failing at the same time. I'll be buying drives one at a time so don't need to worry about buying multiple drives from a bad batch. A good UPS and the parity drives should see me right unless the house burns down.

Calibos

Change of plans on the Gaming/Workstation build. Decided to go air-cooling instead. 2x Noctua NH D14's. Came up with in innovative solution for getting them to fit Actually made itm possible to make the case smaller too

Decided to flog some of my expensive telescope eyepieces to help fund both builds, so things should move quicker. Still in the order of a few weeks though.

17L Volume, 350mm(13") Tall and 250mm(10") Diameter.