Gadgetory

What's up YouTube. I want to show you my most recent project. My wall-mounted, water-cooled, super powerful rendering computer. I had a ton of fun making this video so I hope you enjoy it. Go ahead and click the link in the bottom left-hand corner if you want to see the list of parts that I used to build this computer. So what I've done up to this point is I've kind of figured out how much space all the components take up on the board, and then measured my board accordingly, and now I'm kind of just drawing all of the outlines. The power supply goes here, the SSD goes here, hard drives go here, sound card, video card. And when I sketch out kind of the basic placement of it, I also sketch out where the wires are going to bend down into the holes as they go underneath to kind of keep it more clean. Because with each of the wires, I'll take kind of the biggest example, when this plugs into the motherboard, it takes a second before it can bend again, and so I have to compensate for that bend so that it'll go down in this hole. So I kind of spread it out just a little bit so it'll allow for a fold in the wire. Same thing with all of the different power cords here. You have to space the hole out far enough so that you don't kink the cable too drastically as you can see like that. Anyway, relatively simple. Just kind of lining everything out right now. Fabricating and figuring out how the acrylic is going to work. I took this board and cut the sides at 45 degree angles so that the light from the LEDs would shine through better on the sides. So that's kind of like my rough cut. And then the SSD will sit just right on top of that. And so when the LEDs turn on with the acrylic underneath, it's going to shine through the edges. And so now that I've kind of made that I can start with the acrylic and make the real mounts. And so the base is going to be here, the LEDs are going to sit there, acrylic's going to sit on top of that, and that's kind of how it works. All right, so I started with the biggest piece of acrylic first, the one that goes for the motherboard, and you can see the rough cut on the edge there that the table saw left as I was cutting it. And then as I set the motherboard on top of it, you can see that it just comes out a little bit on every side so that the LED lights can shine through it. Pretty sweet. Now to make the rest of them. Here I have the LEDs. And I started off, I cut a bunch of them up, and I was planning on soldering them all together but that is actually an extraordinary amount of work, especially because each of these little strips has five solder points on it. So I'm going to avoid soldering that much by taking that roll and rolling it here underneath the wood, just kind of doing one big long continuous strip all the way through the whole box and that'll save me a whole lot of time I think. Drilled myself some pilot holes with the drill. And now I'm going to cut them all out with the jigsaw. Then I'm going to build a frame around the backside of it. So I've already put on the two sides as you can see here. Basically I just put a thin strip of glue along the top, and then drilled holes for the sides. And I'm being super careful with this hard board right here, to not split it, so what I'm doing is I'm taking a large bit, pre-drilling just a small little hole on the top, and then taking smaller bit for the shaft and drilling that down inside where the top hole has already been sunk. Just so you can see how the frame is put together this is the back of it, and I have wood glue in the seam there, as well as screws along the top. So this is all the acrylics in place, they've all been mounted, I'm just going to kind of go through a little bit and tell you how I did things. This is for the graphics card. So I have these two screws going down into the plexiglass and then this one and this one kind of coming out to hold it in place. Then this line in the center is actually a groove, it's a v-shaped groove so that LEDs come up into the groove and then shine out onto the edges which allow the light to shine around all the sides like you've seen before. This is for the audio card. Same thing. These go into the card. This holds it down. This is for the hard drives. These four screws come up into the hard drives into the pre-mounted holes that come with the hard drives. And then for the SSD, there was no really good way to hold that on so I just used some industrial velcro, which is good for 20 pounds, and the SSD weighs like a third of a pound, I don't know. Super small. Power supply. I have some pretty hefty brackets on the back that come in and screw onto the power supply and then this piece of velcro just kind of help hold it so it doesn't twist downward at all which is kind of nice. And this is for the fan. Comes up and then these keep it elevated so there's enough circulation underneath for it to allow--and I can always change the elevation depending on how big a screw I put in there. This is for the motherboard. I have one-inch standoffs. Lifting the motherboard up and away from the plexiglass. And then these screws hold the plexiglass down into the board. And then I'm also going to have three screws coming from the motherboard underneath the wood as well so that's how that's going to be mounted. Anyway, pretty straightforward. I'm just going to go through and kind of clean up these holes right now before I put the sticker over the top, the carbon fiber sticker. And we'll go from there. So now that the sticker's all on, I can go ahead and mount the acrylic pieces and all of the components back where they belong. So the six terabytes of hard drive are actually pretty uniquely mounted. I put the screws in first, and then I screwed the acrylic onto the bottom of the hard drives afterward. That way my screws are all ready to be slid down inside of those holes. I put a piece of electrical tape over the top of the screws to that the PCD boards don't ground out having a piece of metal so close to them. So hopefully that electrical tape will keep enough insulation between the hard drives and the screws themselves. It still has that same little line right there to help guide the light into the outside edges. Mounting the power supply is a little bit trickier. What I ended up taking is some of these framing brackets and just put some screws through the frame of my case here and then screwed it into three of the four power supply slots. And I think honestly it's pretty sturdy. I'm not worried at all about it coming off. This is the motherboard now. You can see I have the one-inch standoffs kind of sticking up. Three of them are replaced by just normal screws, they're going to go and hold the motherboard to the mount itself. So all the standoffs are going to have their own little screws as you can see like in that corner and stuff. And then the other two screws will just come all the way through and there will be a little bit of a gap right there where you can kind of see that light shining through. The CPU fan is a little bit different. It's kind of mounted the same way that the hard drives were. I have these screws coming up from the bottom of the plastic piece. And then I have three more screws coming through the back of it as you can see right there. And then we have the same little v-shaped slit in the plastic to help disperse the light. I did it a little bit different on this one though, I cut a hole out in the center, and I also put the same carbon fiber stuff over the top of this, and I put a hole in the center so that when it's lit up, you won't be able to see the LEDs from straight down, but the light will kind of emanate from around the edge of the fan. Hopefully. So that should be pretty cool. So here's my workstation where I've been the last couple weeks. I've been waiting on a shielded PCI cable which is this guy right here going down to my graphics card. The daisy chain one that I had before wasn't really working out. Sometimes the error code on the motherboard would pop up that the display wasn't reading. So I figured I was getting some kind of interference. Probably where the PCI cord comes down close to the motherboard. Getting some kind of signal interference there. Anyway, it's mostly all put together right now. Here's a view of the back of it, I still need to do some wire maintenance back there and then make sure that the LEDs are in the right spots. Basically I'm just going to tape those in, probably with duct tape and electrical tape. I'll do another shot as soon as I'm finished with that. I was going to mount it right between my 4K TV and the shelf that I built last year, just sitting right there on the wall, next to my monitors. Should turn out pretty well I think. So here's the back of the computer. I have a lot of duct tape covering up the LEDs as they loop around underneath the acrylic so that the light doesn't bleed out and then come out through the cable slots. I want those to kind of be darker than everything else to not take away from the LED effect. All right, we're making progress. I moved the shelf over a stud, that way I had room for the cables, obviously we need a little more cable management going on. Need a new power cable for the power supply, that one's not quite long enough. So those are ordered, they'll be here in a couple days and then I can finish up my videos. So one thing about this setup that I'm not super fond of is that the heat from the motherboard is rising up underneath the fan, and so it's heating it up and it's running about ten degrees Celsius hotter than than it was before. Well, more like seven degrees Celsius hotter. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull it back off the wall and extend this out about another inch and that should give me a little more airflow. And then hopefully it'll just run quiet the whole time. Thanks a ton for watching, if you have any questions, make sure to leave them down in the comments below, don't forget to like if this video helped you or if you found it interesting and don't forget to subscribe. It does mean a lot to me. Thanks for watching!