The past week I've been working on modding an old PC case to move my old / current PC into. The idea being my new PC can then go into the case of my current PC.
The PC consists of the motherboard, CPU, M.2 drive, and RAM from my old PC. The CPU Cooler, PSU, etc. from the old PC are being retained for the (real) new PC, and I bought a new cooler and PSU to be used with the old motherboard in this build.
Mesh front and fans
The case I got for fitting the old PC into is an old Gigabyte GZ-X1 Mid Tower case. Like the vast majority of PC cases it is poorly designed, with little thought given to keeping components cool. However, other than this, the design compares very favourably to most other cases.
It has space for quite a few 3.5″ drives, and four 5.25″ bays. In my case I decided to dispense with the 5.25″ bays (at least from an external perspective) and fill the front with fans. This is important for good airflow over any hard drives in the case.
The first thing in terms of the case mod was to dispose of the worse than useless plastic case front. Next job was cutting away the metal front of the case (normally hidden behind the plastic front).
The top 5.25″ bays have metal covers you can just twist to snap off. The lower half of the case front though is just solid sheet metal, except for some breathing holes near the bottom where a 120mm could be mounted behind. I am a 140mm fan guy (The larger the fan, the more air it can move, so lower RPMs, and thus lower noise) so this was no good for me anyway. I just used a dremel to cut away all this section of the case, keeping the same spacing as the top section of the case.
I also had to cut out a section of the bottom part of the 5.25″ bays cage to enable fitting a 120mm fan in the middle, crossing between the bottom (3.5″ bays) and top (5.25″ bays) halves of the case. The case will only fit two 140mm fans and one 120mm fan, hence my use of a 120mm fan here. It also works much better with the spacing available.
I used some wire mesh ~6mm spacing on the front of the case. This doesn't block any airflow to the fans, while preventing you / kids from accidentally / purposefully putting your fingers or anything else into the fans. I managed to secure this with screws going into holes already drilled / punched into the case - they weren't actually threaded but the screws went in okay with a bit of force to get them to tap.
Front I/O
Above the 120mm fan in the middle I was left with a space similar to a 3.5″ bay. I thought that would make a good space for some front I/O. I had a USB 3.0 w/ HD audio front panel I had purchased previously. The board from this almost fit, but not quite. I had to cut / grind out a slot in the bottom of the 5.25″ bays cage that the end of the front panel PCB could slot into. I also had to cut out a small section of edge of the 3.5″ bays column to allow for the HD audio header connector to the front panel PCB.
I had a USB 2.0 rear slot plate, so I unscrewed the sockets from this, to screw them into the front I/O area on the case instead. I also had a USB-C cable to attach. However, after attaching one of the USB 2.0 sockets and the USB-C socket, I found there wasn't enough space for the second USB 2.0 socket (you get 2 sockets on one header). I tried filing down the plastic around the USB-C and one of the USB 2.0 sockets in order to get them to fit one above the other, but without success.
I decided to just go with the one USB 2.0 socket instead, but once I had started assembling the actual PC in the case I found the cable was too short. The other issue was it meant the front I/O ports were very close together, so you'd have trouble plugging multiple things in at one. So in the end I removed the USB 2.0 socket and put the USB-C socket there instead. Annoyingly, this was after when I'd already cut the mesh for where I had been trying to position the sockets. So the mesh around the I/O area is not quite as neat as it should be.
While the I/O ports are right up against the mesh, this doesn't seem to cause any problems. I can plug USB devices and and audio cables in no problem. When testing the audio I did notice it was a bit buzzy, but with the front I/O board loose (so not touching any metal), and only the HD audio connected (USB headers disconnected) it was still the same. Now I have the PC set up at home I also get slight buzz via my USB audio interface, so my guess is it's down to the cheap PSU (Cylon 700W) I'm using.
Power button
For the power button I had the reset switch (I think from the same case, the power switch from the case I was using with the board for my new PC). Then a plastic power button. The plastic power button is meant to attach into the plastic case front (I don't think it was actually from the Gigabyte case I was using, but another case). Since my modified case doesn't have any way of attaching the button, I had to make something up.
I hot glued the push part of the switch onto the rear of the plastic button, so pushing the plastic button will push the switch. For attaching the switch to the case I bent a rear slot plate / cover, so it would form an S shape (with the top of the S being quite long). I then epoxied the bottom of this onto the top of the reset switch.
The plastic button I was using had some bits that poked out alongside the switch. When I glued the bracket onto the top of the switch I found the glue squeezed out onto this plastic, so I had to insert a piece of paper between the switch and the plastic (only thing thin enough) to prevent them being glued together (which would have meant you couldn't depress the switch). Once the epoxy had dried, I managed to get most of the paper out, but there was some left in the area where the actual glue was. Thankfully, pressing the button depressed the switch and ripped the paper through the middle, so this did work to prevent them being stuck together. It was a bit rough when pressing the button, so I sprayed some WD40 on the glued area and this sorted that out.
For attaching the switch to the case I could now put a screw through a hole in the side of the lowest 5.25″ bay and into a hole in the bracket. I was thinking I would need to drill out a hole in the bracket and use a screw with a nut on the other side, as I couldn't fit a screw into the bracket's existing hole. But Will tried it with a more wood screw type screw, and this went in okay.
The button I'm using did have a hole to insert a power LED into (so the button lights up when the PC is on). But I don't like coloured lights near my PC (bad for colour accuracy) and I can tell if it's on by if the fans are spinning or not. So I left this out.
External SATA
Since I am still going to be using this as my current PC until I get the new one up and running, I needed some way of connecting hot-swap HDs. I need one for my 2.5″ SATA SSD that I store my work on, and one for my 3.5″ SATA HDs used for daily backups.
So for this I just ran a couple of long SATA cables and a power cable with a molex to SATA then SATA to 2x SATA power adapter attached. While not quite as convenient as a trayless backplane, it should still be pretty easy to connect / disconnect the drives as needed. And unlike a backplane, it doesn't matter the physical size of the disk being plugged in.
Cable Management
In terms of cable management, it's not something this case really provides. And using a non-modular PSU like the one I'm using, just worsens the problem. The PCI-e power cables and 2nd SATA / Molex cable that I wasn't using, I just tucked up in the corner of the case. The other cables I tried to neaten up / tie together as best I could.
The fan cables I used a single header to four fans adapter. The Gigabyte fan (which I think comes from this case) has about a 5cm fan cable, and the Noctua fan only has around a 10cm cable. So the use of the adapter cable was more for giving enough extension to allow plugging the fans in rather than the motherboard not having enough fan headers.
Drive bays
For adding in 3.5″ hard drives, with the motherboard in the case I found that I couldn't insert the drive into the top slots. To be able to do this I'd need to remove the RAM and the front fan on the CPU cooler. So this case design would not be suitable if you needed to keep the machine on when swapping out a drive (assuming you had to use those drive slots).
As I'm only currently putting a single HD in it, I just put the drive in a lower slot. Even if I did have to use those slots that are blocked by the RAM / cooler fan, it wouldn't be a big problem as the only time I would need to do that would be when installing the drive.
Hotswap bays are best for allowing easy changing of drives, but I'm not really a fan of them for permanently installed drives. This is because they tend to have very poor airflow over the drives, so the drives get very hot and are more likely to die.
Case orientation
I initially placed the motherboard in the case for a quick test, before I had removed the CPU heatsink I intended on keeping for use with the new PC. And I found that actually it did fit and the case lid would close up okay with this larger heatsink (Noctua NH-D15S). So I am now thinking I will do another similar mod on one of these cases for my new PC, rather than using the 5U Server chassis I was using previously / intending on using for the new PC.
The only negative of this is that the case lid / side panel has a raised area above the CPU. I don't know what the reason for this is, but it will prevent stacking one machine on top of another when using them in desktop / rack orientation.
The case is around 4U and on my shelf two of these stacked would fit nicely. I think what I would need to end up doing is running the bottom one with the side / top panel removed. I did look to see if there was such a thing as a PCI-e to PCI-e link device for connecting 2 PCs together, as the top PC could also have it's bottom panel removed then a cable used to link the 2 machines together. However, it seems that while such a thing (though not just a simple cable, it would need a logic board) would be possible, it doesn't exist.
The reason I prefer rack mount orientation is because it puts the weight of the heavy CPU cooler pushing down on the CPU (as it should be), rather than trying to bend the motherboard as it would be with the case in tower orientation. Similarly, with a GPU (though I don't have a decent one currently), rack orientation puts the weight of the card pushing down into the slot rather than pulling down on the slot as it would be in a tower case.
For watercooling I can understand a tower case. Similarly, for basic GPUs and stock / cheap CPU coolers, a tower case orientation may well make sense. But for weighty air coolers (both on CPU and GPU), rack / desktop orientation is much more sensible.
For my new PC I'm thinking rather than the wire mesh front I might go for some wood, then drill lots of holes in it for airflow. But we will have to see how that goes.
