I want a case in a fun shape and this is the best layout I can come up with that fits the build volume of my 3d printer.
There are 20mm tall rubber feet on the bottom allowing air to enter through the bottom. 4 hard drives are in a cage off to the left and spaced with 16 mm gaps between them.
The air flows through them l and pulls heat from the open gap in the front as well as past the edges of the GPU. There is a 140mm fan in the rear sucking it out.
At the top is an SFX power supply pulling air out of the top of the case and venting it out back.
There are no openings on the face or sides.
I’ve had to make changes as one of the goals it to use as many locally-sourced parts as I can, so most replacements can be sourced in a day, reducing downtime. That’s limiting on some ways but there is a microcenter nearby so it’s not that bad.
My concern here is the cooling might not be adequate. I was considering adding a fan just for the hard dries and ducting them to pull their air from the bottom too but that would contract from the available air intake for the rest of the components. I could duct the drives to part of the rear fan so it pulls part from the drive cage area and part from the rear of the case, but that could reduce cooling for the GPU since there’s less room to pull hot air from around it.
It’s a home media server but it might see some transcodes and game streaming use too so I put a 3 slot GPU in there to force me to accommodate such a thing while designing it. I also want to release this when I’m done so others might be able to use it too, which means I need to accommodate heavier uses with bigger CPU and GPU cooling needs.
I’m not entirely convinced this will cool effectively. Am I overthinking this?
Are those mechanical hard drives? If so, I would want a fan moving air across them. Also keep in mind that most filament is not ESD safe.
Oof, moving plastic filament rubbing on plastic guides. Sounds like static waiting to happen.
I never thought of that.
I don't know much about static electricity and plastic, but would it be sufficient to ground off an arbitrary point in the case to the body of the PSU?
It would not. Static electricity in insulators such as plastic is localized. It can't move across the plastic to the grounding point.
I'd recommend using conductive filament if you can or even just coating it with conductive paint before it touches anything electrically sensitive might do the trick. It doesn't have to be a great conductor, just a tiny bit of conductivity will prevent any significant static charges from building up.
The openings under them and the spacing between them is to allow air to be pulled through them.
I was concerned about the filament and ESD too but have been told the motherboard would just ground out to the PSU through the power connector and not to worry about it. Since the hard drives are also connected I figured they would ground out the way too. There is ESD safe filament I could use for the drive cage though.
Just looking to learn, who told you that?
I don’t know, someone online, I remember arguing the exact same thing about 3-D printed computer cases being a bad idea because of static concerns,but I was basically mauled in the comment section for it
Check out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXkgbmr3dRA
I wonder if I put chicken wire against the inner walls and run that to the case of the power supply would that work well enough?
You can get conductive paint for RFI shielding. It's very conductive, so make sure that the case can't come in contact with any circuit boards or it will short out. Make sure the paint is compatible with the type of plastic you print the case out of too.
They also make ESD safe filament, but it's $150+ a roll.
The paint sounds promising. It just needs to stick to ASA. I’m not sanding anything either so it’s not flat but that might be a good thing to increase surface area for the paint to bind to.