PC Hardware

Beginnings - Winter 2020

Beginning my freshman year of college, I began my dive into the computer hardware space. Having always been curious, but ashamed to be interested in something so "nerdy", I began seriously learning about one of the most ubiquitous machines around. The passion culminated during the COVID Spring of 2020 by finally building my own computer. Presently, I maintain two machines and have flipped a few more for profit.

Starting with this ancient (circa 2000) Dell Dimension 4100, I sought to build a "sleeper" PC in this old chassis. I sourced the inoperable and useless machine from a neighbors basement. This puppy was rocking an Intel Pentium III/866 MHz, 512 MB of RAM, and a 40 GB HDD, oh baby!


As cool as the old tech was, I ended up gutting the machine and Dremel-ing out the I/O shield to make way for the modern motherboard. I believe this case was of the AT standard which was incompatible with modern ATX standard, but I am not 100% sure.


Unfortunately, I had to put my Sleeper PC ambitions on hold for a moment. As this way my first PC build, I was in over my head and had no idea what success looked like. I didn't know what I was doing and decided to buy an older, but functional, office machine with the intentions of adding a graphics card.

The Lenovo I purchased sported an Intel i5-2500, 8 GB of RAM, and an iGPU. And after being convinced by multiple YouTube tech personalities, I thought adding a GPU and power supply would be an easy upgrade to the unit. I was wrong...

The Lenovo machine thwarted my attempts of adding a GPU due to an incompatibility with the motherboard, something exceedingly rare and only done by OEM's to "protect their hardware" (i.e. create more e-waste).


Spring/Summer 2020

After a couple failed attempts at purchasing used PC hardware from internet forums (RE: it's too good to be true), I caved and bought new hardware for the build. At this point, it had been 3 months and I was understandably antsy about getting something to post.

Just as I had originally hoped, the ancient Dell case was used in the final product (see: photo right). The finished product contained an AMD Ryzen 5 3600, a Nvidia GTX 1650 Super 4GB, and 16 GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3000 CL15.

The observant nerds among you would notice the mini ITX motherboard being used in the build. Knowing that my true passion lied in Small Form Factor (SFF) computers, I purchased a smaller motherboard to allow for future growth.

PCPartPicker List


And future growth most certainly came. As I was unhappy about the current SFF computer case market. Quality sub 20 Liter cases were going for $150 to $300 and I simply couldn't justify that. So I decided to build my own case from the remains of old computers. By chopping up and stitching together an old mATX office computer, I was able to make something small enough to scratch my itch. The case came in just below 20 L, making it a true SFF PC.

The case was then given a coat of paint and some feet to complete the metal work for the build. The finishing touches for the case were an acrylic side panel and a walnut wood shell (custom made by brother Dieter).

Unfortunately, as this is a custom enclosure, I failed to add a power button. So in order to start my computer, I use a screwdriver and short some pins on the motherboard.

Future builds will be smaller (approx. 12 L) and include a power button.