Cube case project

My home server died recently. The old computer was a piece of trash gathered from where ever I could find the parts. Anyway, it didn't seem to be worth trying to fix it, so I decided to build a new one.

The old server was not loud by any means, but you could still hear it in a silent room. And since the server is located in a closet in my bedroom, silence is preferred. Therefore, the new server needed to be as silent as possible.

The main use for my home server is to run Irssi, so it doesn't need to be very powerful. :) Taking this into consideration, a passively cooled solution is very possible. Eventually I bought the following parts for the server:

No moving parts yet, yay!

I searched for suitable cases on the Internet without success. It seems that all the cases are either too small to have efficient and silent cooling, too expensive, too ugly or some combination of the above. Eventually I decided to build a suitable case by myself.

After some thinking I came up with a (cunning) plan to use sheet metal to construct an inner case that holds all the electrical components, and then a nice-looking outer case from wood. For good ventilation I decided to make the floor and roof of the case from wire mesh.

I don't have good tools for handling metal, so the inner case turned out quite.. erm.. rough. :) But it gets the job done. It's big enough to hold a Mini-ITX motherboard, the PicoPSU and one 3,5" or 2,5" hard drive. The mounting holes for the hard drive are visible on the right side of the case in the picture below.

The outer case is made mainly from birch. All the strips are made from pine.

Here's a picture of the wire mesh in the bottom of the case. The mesh fits in grooves that I sawed to the inner sides of the wooden case. Once the sides of the case were attached the mesh has no room to move and it stays in it's place nicely.

The metallic inner case fits snuggly inside the wooden case.

The roof of the case is made of the same strips that are used on the corners of the case. The wire mesh is fitted to the roof using the same technique as in the floor of the case.

The roof is not attached to the rest of the case, so it can be removed by simply lifting it up. The same goes for the metallic inner case. Because the sides of the wooden case are glued and screwed together permanently, it would be really difficult to do any maintenance for the computer if the metallic case wasn't removable.

After attaching the corner strips (that also act as legs), the case was basically finished. It looks big in the picture, but in reality it's quite small, 23*23*25cm (w*d*h).

The case still looked quite rough. To make the it look really good, I applied a few coats of varnish (after a careful sanding). Varnish makes the color of the wood stand out really nicely, in my opinion.

To make the computer stay nice and cool even if I decide to run something else than Irssi on it, I added a Noctua NF-S12 fan to the bottom of the case (blowing upwards through the case). At 5V voltage it's basically inaudible, so the goal of having a silent server didn't get compromised too much.

Overall I'm pleasantly surprised and really happy about how the case turned out. In the beginning I was planning on putting the server to the same closet where the old server had been placed, but I think that I'll leave the new one somewhere visible. It looks so good. :)

In case you have any questions or comments, feedback is very much appreciated. Contact information can be found from the front page.

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