MPC --- 2.16 litre SFFPC by cbwn

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

Posted to Thingiverse via this Reddit thread and for the /SFFPC community: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/meg5b5/3d_printed_216_litre_htpc_with_cpu_and_memory/
v1
I drew and printed this case for the salvaged parts from an old 2013 27" iMac I was given because it was thought dead. I think the old hard drive was the faulty part and I could have just fixed that, but thought it was more fun to create a tiny media PC for the living room instead.
The CPU is an i5 4750 Haswell chip on a Asus H81T board and it's running 2x8gb of 1600Mhz DDR3 SODIMMs. For storage is a Kingston A400 240gb SSD drive with Windows 10. Cooling is sorted by a Noctua NH-L9i which contains a 10 minute Cinebench run at a maximum of 70*C. Aside from this I have thrown in a cheap Amazon Wifi/bluetooth Mini PCIe card and added an Aliaz 80g mechanical keyboard switch as power switch plus a couple of white status LEDs. For power I use a 180watt external brick, which is way overkill for the system, but it works just fine for me.
The whole process started with finding the perfect Haswell era mini ITX board which also supports the iMac SODIMMs and an external power brick. I found an Italian Ebay listing of a somewhat affordable Asus H81T and was very surprised to have it arrive in the original box brand new and never used - nice surprise since I thought I would most likely receive a salvaged board.
Unfortunately I couldn't reuse the old iMac network card and antennas on the H81T, since the iMac card is too long and with some sort of proprietary connector.. I ended up buying a cheap Mini PCIe card from amazon along with a pack of bundled short antennas + wire connectors.
The case is custom made for this particular board with integrated I/O-panel, but aside from I/O, the rest of the case should fit a few of ASUS' slim ITX boards, also newer ones. I regrettably didn't measure out the motherboard stand-off spacing well enough so they don't quite align, but mixing m3 and m4 screws ended up securing the board in the end. It is something I need to fix though...
BONUS for the interested: If you were to salvage everything from an iMac, including the screen, this board should be able to connect and power an iMac LCD panel directly from the motherboard. So if AIO is your thing or you want to get ultra creative, then that should be fun to tinker with.
Updates:
v2: Motherboard stand-off alignment should be fixed now, but I haven't printed the case to confirm yet.
Hardware:
Everything is put together using only M3x6mm nuts and M3 threaded heat inserts. You also need a couple of LEDs and any mechanical keyboard switch to complete the case.
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