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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

I let my CPU fan do its default color changing rainbow, buuuut only because it's under my desk where I can't see it. If nothing else, I can quickly glance down there and see if the computer is powered on.

AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors, I guess the market for enthusiast range parts has decided that we want RGB hardware.

Personally I think case aesthetics peaked around the Antec P180 which looked like brushed metal fridge and was one of the first cases to care about sound isolation. No window panel, so nobody cares how much of a mess my wiring is, and I can buy the RAM that's on sale instead of the one with color coordinated heatspreaders.

But if other people are into that, power to them.

Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top" build and ditch the suspended computer mount completely, assuming I still even want to have a full desktop computer 10 years from now.

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> Someday I'd like to do a "desktop literally built into the desk top"

For 7 years my desktop has been literally just a motherboard sitting on a cut-up yoga mat on my bookshelf. [1] The SSDs are piled next to it. My work PC is zip-tied to a milk crate. Don't let people fool you, you can be pretty creative with your definition of "case".

[1] https://i.imgur.com/NkEmS4N.png

That’s awesome. Are yoga mats dissipative? Is this like a poor man’s ESD mat (figuratively speaking, not trying to imply that you’re poor)?

No idea, at the very least it didn't seem to build up a static charge, and it's worked fine for me for a long time. I imagine it probably depends on the specific yoga mat.

I used to just have it directly on the wood, which was fine too, but then I put it on top of an upside-down, powder-coated-metal IKEA drawer thing (so I could put the power supply underneath for more shelf space). My fiancee was worried it might get scratched and conduct at some point, so we added the yoga mat.

> Are yoga mats dissipative?

Not at all, it's plastic!

But my case (with mesh intakes) serves the important function of keeping cat hair out of the heatsinks

I actually have a medium-hair cat and it's been fine. But it's pretty far off the floor.

Yeah now that you mention it, mine has needed this a lot less since I hung it under the desk earlier this year. It used to be on the floor.

The party hats are a nice touch

Thanks! I made them for a video Github put out last year, [1] and decided to keep 'em around.

https://youtu.be/w5HykygC43Y?t=7

My old i5-2500K based build was like that for many, many years. It sat on my desk on top of an anti-static bag (that the motherboard came in). The new graphics card I had, which was a gtx 480 maybe, wouldn't fit in the old case I had.

It took me at least 5 years to get a new case, much to my wife's annoyance.

It was fine. Swapping SSDs was easy. >.<

> desktop literally built into the desk top

DIY Perks did that.

Invisible PC - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Perqf0dOGLk

Invisible monitor - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E0mNSMBmFQ

This is perfect!

desktop literally built into the desk top

The Sun "pizza box" computer was like that.[1]

You could just bolt a 1U rackmount server to the underside of a desktop. Or get a desk that's 1.75 inches thick, cut a hole of the appropriate size, and recess the server into it. There are lots of under the desk computer mounts, but I haven't seen a recessed one.

[1] https://blog.pizzabox.computer/pizzaboxes/sparcstation/

Biggest issue I find with using a 1u case for a client is fan noise - short of some clever modification to the side panels to fit larger fans transverse, it's near impossible to get acceptably quiet 1u fans.

I imagine something like this: https://www.pcworld.com/article/2047642/how-a-legendary-pc-m...

Except without the glass top. Or perhaps glass with a very dark tint so that it looks black, but with sufficiently bright internal lighting you can see through it.

The easier and more likely version would be to make the computer fit in a normal desk drawer. Prefer that to a 1U on account of fan size as another commenter mentioned, but being off to one side instead of the whole desk surface has the benefit of not making the whole desk chunkier.

That site won't even scroll with the 19 ad trackers blocked.

Working for me with 20 things blocked by ublock, but try this: https://www.l3p.nl/l3p-d3sk/

The other link is showing this desk and another commercialized version inspired by it.

Might be nice to have the fan color change with the cpu temp, but otherwise it always seems gaudy. I like things having function in addition to form.

Then again, I also gave up on desktops roughly 8 years ago. If it isn't my laptop it is a NUC or similar small form factor thing that can be mounted on the back of the monitor or otherwise hidden away.

>AMD ships them standard with their Ryzen processors

Only for the ryzen 7 and the r9 _900 cpus. The low end ones come with a basic black cooler and the high end come with nothing.

Ah, I'm on a Ryzen 7.

I was used to always getting an aftermarket cooler for previous Intel builds to replace the stock one with the whiny little fan, but the included Ryzen 7 cooler is comparatively great (unnecessary bling aside).

Do you know if newer cases gotten better than P180, for sound isolation while keeping cool?

That's still my case, but it's huge and I don't need that space anymore.

Check out the bequiet! brand cases.

No idea - I remember spending a lot of time browsing Silent PC Review on previous builds to make sure I got an appropriately quiet power supply and everything else, but it stopped doing any meaningful testing years ago, and the current incarnation basically looks like affiliate link blogspam.

Be careful aiming for sound isolation, it can be counterproductive.

Generally speaking "sound isolation" means reducing where sound can escape from the case, and putting some noise absorbing foam where you can to dampen the noise.

The counterproductive part is that having a lot of airflow would be the opposite of "sound isolating" -- anywhere air flows freely sound does as well. So by definition a sound isolating case has poor airflow. Poor airflow could require you to run your fans at higher RPMs to compensate, which is then introducing more noise than you would have had with a more open case that could run low RPM fans.

Gamers Nexus did a good piece on this https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3391-airflow-vs-silent-ca...

(as he points out, there are still reasons to prefer sound isolating cases, it's just not as much of a clear win as it might sound at first)

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