Found in small ads. Dude has options.
Do I see a mini pc cluster in your near future? I’ve recently started a home lab with a handful of raspberry pi’s, a Mac mini and go two of these.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2025
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Cover the cut side panel with some nice black mesh and it could almost look factory
I too once dremel'd a pc case to fit everything in. As long as your airflow is fine, you're golden.
The biggest case I could find had literally 1mm of clearance for my video card, I'm starting to think it will become standard procedure at some point.
What card? Because there should be plenty of options with more clearance for even 4090 and 5090s. Unless it's a special commercial card like the A series?
Consumer cards are often actually bigger than the datacenter counterparts.
Most CPUs and GPUs in a rack just have low profile heat sinks and depend on the chassis to move the air. Since a datacenter doesn't care about noise the chassis will just have a shot load of fans running full tilt over the fanless components.
Though when you get up to the large ML cards from AMD for example they have like Kleenex box sized heatsinks on them.
Typically, yes, since they are meant to be more "modular" in nature and let you sync up 4-5. But I'm not familiar with all the varieties of commercial cards out there and didn't want to dismiss the possibility of a longer one existing.
But I don't know if any consumer card that is so big only one or two cases fit it. Sure, some of them are so big that you need a fairly large case, but for example the ASUS 5090 Astral is one of the larger 5090s, and is 358mm long. The Lian Li O11 Dynamic EVO RGB case can fit a GPU up to 455mm in length. The Lian Li Lancool 217 (a case on the medium to smaller side for full ATX) can fit up to 380mm in length. Tight, but not 1mm tight. The Fractal Design Meshify 2 (ATX case, not mini) can fit up to 445mm in length with the front fans in place.
Unless the comment poster is specifically looking for SFF cases, I don't know what is causing the difficulty.
Although, clearance for GPU height is becoming more of an issue, so that might be what is referred to for the 1mm clearance. In that case, there are still options out there but it is much more difficult and some require vertical mounting.
Edit: changed OP to comment poster and added caveat
I really want to make some PC sleeper build disgusted as oldy Unix workstation, with some Linux desktop (Debian probably) running ancient window manager like FVWM. Would be cool to surprise people with it running modern games, lol.
"disgusted"
Oh, autoincorrect, never change... Haha
Almost choked while brushing my teeth reafing this ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Or those old Packard Bell yellow-white cases.....
Beige?
So that's what it means to think outside the box. I've always wondered.
My daily driver is a PC like that, Thinkcentre tiny 6500T (32GB/2TB samsung, works like a charm!), I would be a itty bitty scared about the power draw as it comes from one of these "laptop plugs". I wonder what's the GPU models...
I also have a game-box for all windoze ~~crapwear~~ crapware with a RX6400 to not blow the think centre (tower) PSU.
I like think centres.
I had a bulky ATX case with i7-3770k (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) and 3 years ago I switched to a mini PC, Beelink SER5 with a 5600H, 32GB RAM, 512MB M2. It is incredible, it is like 5"x4" on my desk, super silent, super fast, mini PC are incredible! Can plug 3x 4K display. Now they have pretty good GPU too.
First thing I did was to install MX Linux on it. It is my daily PC, using it for work for 3 years now.
Are those NVMe GPUs? Where can one obtain such things?
Depends on if you are space constrained or not.
If not any GPU can be an M.2 GPU, so long as you don't mind the 4x lanes.
Plenty of riser kits available from AliExpress or similar etailors. I've got an old HP all-in-one I've considered strapping a GPU to for some encoding tasks (plex / frigate) but also for shits and giggles.
No, there's a specific model of think center tiny with a 16x slot - intended for an Nvidia P620 or T400, or something equivalent from AMD. Cutting the case let this low profile slot in.
Unfortunately AMD doesn't really have any good LP GPUs, most of them are just Display Adapters
Would be great as a local device dedicated to transcoding or running an LLM. Or as a steam machine.
transcoding
It's a ThinkCentre, trans coding is traditionally performed using a ThinkPad.
I have earlier gen and it’s kinda underpowered and undercooled. Sawzall mod should help, but I’d look for results before attempting that.
At first glance I just thought: Wow, that's packed in so nicely and fits so well! Then I realized the cover was already on...
Didn't need to hack the case up, could have simply removed it all together
But then they wouldn't have gotten to go BRRRRRR on that case with a Dremel for two hours OR posts pictures on the Internet of this thing that they almost certainly never used for any sustained period of time.
And what is PC building if not those two things?
c/buildapc goes BRRRRRR
I can't argue with that
Impressive.
Though at that point I would've cut a large square out of the case and gone for a plexi cover, with holes for the fans.
Though this approach is really impressive.
I use one of these at work lol. Unmodified without dedicated graphics though.
Nice, what are the specs? It would look good with a grill added.
Serious question: does it not fit (with the case closed) otherwise?
It's probably for airflow
It is, the main fan for the whole machine is the one on the right and these machines rely on very little clearance for the fan to work. The slot the GPU is using would usually be expected to be used for a network card. The case itself has no holes/etc for airflow by default there for most models. There's a lot of interesting mods for these cases, usually a bit fancier, but this works.
Temps on these change drastically with the case off.
Had it been a smaller GPU, would it be better?
Barely maybe, the fan would still be right up against a solid wall. There are projects out there to add cooling fans to network cards that would fit in that area. It's just rough, airflow wise.