I built a PC out of rope and wood...

now despite appearances this is actually a fully-fledged PC that's been built from the ground up to look more like a sculpture or a work of art as a result it's got some really interesting design elements like this rope that runs along the edges of this cantilever central platform that houses the core of a computer itself now we've also got some industrial looking heat sinks on the top and bottom here and these do a great job of keeping the core components cool all while making hardly any noise at all which is quite an accomplishment because the components used in here are very powerful and in case you're wondering why there's two of them we've got one for the graphics card and one for the processor now it was a huge challenge to construct but as a result it's also very interesting to see how it was all done which is essentially what this video is all about so sit back and enjoy as I show you everything involved in making this thing from start to finish before we start a big thanks must go out to these brands for helping to make this build happen so the first thing to tackle for this build was the not so easy task of replacing the low profile graphics card heatsink with a tower cooler for the visual look of the final build and also for quieter operation the card I'm using here is a ZOTAC GTX 1018 mini which ZOTAC is very kindly provided for this build is one of the fastest cards you can buy and should power through pretty much any game that's thrown at it unusually for such a powerful card it's very short which was essential for the build for aesthetic reasons so after removing its heatsink I could clean the thermal compound off the die and get it ready for the new tower cooler the problem here though is that the original cooler spread out over the card cooling other high heat components like the power delivery secretary to ensure that all these other regions are kept cool I got a sheet of copper which is a superb conduct of heat and cut it down manually into some precisely measured cooling plates to help transfer the heat around these I'm also going to use a heat pipe these contain a low pressure liquid and a wick and can rapidly transfer heat from one end to the other it was pretty easy to bend into shape using a pipe bender after which it could be mounted directly onto the smallest copper plate now these pieces are going to work in tandem with one of the best air based CPU tower cool as you can by the Noctua NH D 15 I've always liked this kind of heat sink for its industrial look and I wanted exposed for visual effect CPU air cooling doesn't get much better than this so many thanks to Noctua for providing both of the coolers used in this build so after unscrewing the original mounting hardware I spread some thermal compound over the base and mounted it directly onto the largest of my copper plates securing it tightly in place with some countersunk screws as I want this plate to also cool the memory modules on the graphics card itself I placed some blue thermal pads on top as I rest slightly lower than the GPU die I then spread some new thermal compound over the die and screwed the whole plate down directly on top I was a little concerned that having such a thick sheet of copper in between the dine the heatsink could harm cooling performance but after testing this was proven to be a non-issue which I'll go into more detail about later so now it was time to add the heat pipe plate which was built to cool the voltage delivery circuitry as this area gets very toasty when the card is at full load now two thermally join these heat pipes to the tower cooler I mounted the final copper plate on top with copious amounts of thermal compound between it and the heat pipes this allows the heat pipes to dump their heat into the top of the coolers base which in turn would take up the heat through its own lead pipes and expel it through the fins so with that this one-of-a-kind graphics card was ready for business and looks very serious if you ask me after doing some testing I did discover that the coils needed some extra cooling too so I mounted an aluminium angle directly onto them so that their heat could be transferred directly to the heat pipes the next thing to do was get some nice-looking wood for building the case itself and I ended up with some beautiful album from a local joiners workshop the first piece I made with this was the platform for the graphics card which is made out of three bits of elm joined together with aluminium bars the reason it's in three pieces is so that it can fit tightly around the tower cooler with the only gaps being for the heat pipes so after placing some nuts and washers on the card to act as spacers I slid the first wooden piece in between the heat pipes and screwed it securely to the top most copper plate the black stuff I've added around the heat pipes themselves is actually a black tack which is there to make an airtight seal with the wood the reason for which I'll go into more detail about later now I could up the first fan which has been soft mounted with sponge inside an aluminium shroud which should reduce any resonance that might get transferred into the wood at this point all the aluminium bars could be screwed back in place to allowing the front and back pieces to be mounted also so with that done I could move on to making the central frame this was made by bending a reasonably thick piece of aluminium sheet into shape and then drilling a lot of precisely positioned holes in it as well as adding a couple of cutouts for certain ports this could then be screwed tightly to the aluminium angles that run around the perimeter of the graphics card platform and you can see that it's starting to come together now in order to plug the graphics card into the motherboard I had to use a 38 centimeter extension cable for it this is a good quality yanli cable which has been very kindly provided by overclockers UK now I'm very grateful for this actually as the cable is almost 70 pounds so I'm super glad they came to my rescue I plugged this into the graphics card using a little blue right angle adapter so that the cable itself would come out vertically and then plug the power cable in also so now it was time to make the platform for the motherboard again I used some aluminium for this onto which I screwed some right angle brackets that had some threaded inserts added these threaded inserts are something I've only just become aware of actually and I wish I'd known about them before because they're just so useful you do need to tall for them and they work by being threaded onto its tip after which they can be pulled and crimped inside a mounting hole it's really nifty so if you guys want to do this too I've put a link to the tool in the description with that done I also added some standoffs for the motherboard to later be mounted to after which it could simply be dropped in place and secured reliably thanks to the threaded inserts now it was time to ant the front facade this again was made out of elm and to get the beautiful curves I had to thicken the insides of the corners by gluing in some more Elm layers to the inside I could then take off the majority of this corner with a saw and then use a plane to round tough finalizing it with some careful sanding after I mounted it to the central frame it was time to amp the motherboard the one I'm going to use is an Asus z3 70 i which is one of the best small format boards you can buy which has been provided for this build by reichelt a link to which you can find in the description as I wanted this to be a very high performance system I've loaded it up with 32 gigabytes of RAM and an Intel i7 8700 k-6 core processor which I later managed to overclock to a very respectable 5 gigahertz as builds go there really aren't very many compromises here and it really is top tier performance now for storage Western Digital is stepped up to the mark and provided something very special which is a 2 terabyte SSD in an MDOT two form factor this thing is incredible simply because of the sheer amount of data it can store despite its tiny physical size this is from their blue range of drives and it doesn't cost as much as you might think so put some links to it in the description there's no need for any wires here the drive just plugs directly into the motherboard underneath this heatsink and it's good to go now mounting the board itself was a bit of a squeeze due to the graphics card extension cable but with a bit of coaxing I got it nice and secure and then proceeded to plug everything else in like the on button side USB ports and all of the power cables next I made a platform to cover all of this up this one couldn't hook the heatsink so closely as the fan needs to move air over the motherboard itself to keep its various hot spots cool but that's ok because it won't really be visible because it will be on the underside as you can see I've added an SD card reader to this as well which is quite important to me as I offload a lot of data from my cameras this way once it was all screwed in place I added yet another not to a NHD 15 to cool the processor and once the fan had been added as well that was the core of the computer completed and at this point I was extremely curious to see how it would end up looking now as it's very heavy I did need a good strong method of supporting it so what I decided to do was cut out some large L shapes out of a sheet of plywood as they're cut out of a solid piece there's no join at the corners making them very very strong and I even doubled up each pair by gluing and screwing them together making them so rigid that there really was no give at all so after adding plenty of right angle brackets to mount other pieces of wood onto later I could then screw these supports directly to the central frame using some larger bulbs with that done the power supply which is a 500 watt passively cooled fanless unit could be mounted in between them after which I added the rest of the arm panels to cover everything up now at the back here where all the connectors are it's a bit of a mess so what I did was get a sheet of aluminium onto which I mounted various ports that I wanted this gives me pretty much all of the connectivity I need save for perhaps the LAN port and monitor connections I don't think I'll be using lamb as I did add a Wi-Fi antenna inside but for the monitor connections I simply left a gap at the bottom for the wires to escape through these can only be plugged in by removing the rear aluminium panel which is a shame but I doubt that I'll need to access these often so it's not too much for a big deal so to finish things off I added some aluminium around the base and some wood up the sides this left me finally with just these gaps to fill in and what I used for this was some natural flax rope this stuff is very rustic looking and I like it a lot I simply glued each end together and wrapped around them with some thinner twine to hide the join and then the whole loop could be pulled into the grooves this looked really unique in my book particularly for a PC but as you can probably tell there's still a piece missing at the bottom here and that's because it's for a Burton audio play a pure class a headphone amp and DAC this thing has been built squarely focused on sound quality for PC enthusiasts and gamers and includes the ability to roll the op amps for tweaking the sound to your liking I actually tried this out with three of Burson's own op amp sets and was pleased to find that they each offered noticeably different sound characteristics which I'll go into more detail about later now to the very base of the case I mounted all of the connections that were required for the play which means that it can simply be slid in place completing the build [Music] so with the PC now finished how does it perform well thanks to the powerful components it can handle heavy workloads like 4k video editing perfectly and also gaming what's most remarkable about this is that it barely makes any noise at all in the process this is hard to convey over video but here's an example recording taken with an ultra-low noise microphone to give you a general idea these low noise levels are thanks to the large heat sinks particularly in the case of the graphics card which sounded much louder with this original cooler here we can also see that the copper that sits between the die and the heatsink doesn't affect temperatures much as the die is roughly the same temperature is with the stock cooler though it much quieter noise levels reducing noise was the purpose of that black tack that I added earlier by the way as it makes the graphics card chamber airtight and so boxes in the fairly intense high pitch electrical whining generated by the card although typically referred to as coil whine from my testing it appears to actually emanate from the MOSFETs as I D soldered a coil and used a microphone to figure out where the sound was coming from it's not unusual for a graphics card to sound like this but it's usually masked by fan noise which is why it was important for me to reduce it as it became very apparent with a quieter cooler by the way although the bottom processor heatsink is technically upside-down it performs almost identically to it being upright as the heat pipes use internal wicks so aren't affected much by orientation so with the PC having powerful graphics capabilities and processing power it made sense to build in high-end audio - which is where the Burson play comes in this is powerful enough to drive even the most demanding of head phones with practically zero distortion which makes for a very pleasing overall sound quality that's noticeably smoother and more detailed than your average onboard audio as I mentioned previously the op amps can be easily swapped out and can even be used in various configurations to tweak the sound characteristics these particular op amps are designed and manufactured by Burson audio in australia and can be used to upgrade other equipment to like certain high-end PC sound cards I settled for a set of Burson's v6 classic op amps for their smooth sound reproduction but I can always swap these out later if I want to change now one thing that some of you might be wondering is that what this get dusty and the answer is yes and essentially I'm just going to have to deal with the consequences of having to you know push it every once in a while I can also use some compressed you know keep it just free but if I do that once a week it should be kept under control now before I go I've gone over a million subscribers now which is an absolutely fantastic number and I've got to thank each and every one of you for subscribing but other as a result our YouTube has actually sent me a little present in the post so I've not opened this yet but I thought I'd do on camera so you can enjoy in the celebrations as well so let's have a look it's big let's have a look then wait hey now that is something special big thanks to each and every one of you who subscribed because you have made this happen so thanks a lot and hope this is a good 1 million celebration video so hope you've enjoyed it and I'll see you next time good bye for now [Music]

Channel: DIY Perks

Views: 3,716,650

Keywords: pc, scratch build, ropenwood, diy perks, wooden pc, sculpture, computer, art, craft, make, build, cloud unit, technology, heatsinks, gpu

Id: N-z9PidYH4E

Length: 18min 27sec (1107 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/JamEngulfer221]

Am I the only one that quite likes the look of the final product? I thought the rope made it have a kind of 'beach hut' aesthetic.

Maybe it's just my personal preference.

[u/Gloomyghoul]

That's as neat as that rope is ugly.

[u/Lintrix]

Aren't you not supposed to spread the thermal paste thin manually but rather let it spread naturally when you press the heatsink on?

link

[u/Vindictive_Turnip]

Don't get me wrong, this is pretty cool in a lot of ways. But from an aesthetic design standpoint it looks like a tacky beach house threw up on a coffee maker/PC internals.

From a woodworking perspective, I have to wonder what will happen when the wood expands and contracts over time, especially screwed to aluminum like that.

And finally, what's the plan to dissipate heat from the mtherboard, hard drive, and ram? In a workstation application, in 8 hours of on time it might build up quite a bit of heat especially in the PSU.

From a gaming environment, I'm not sure even the CPU and GPU cooling could keep up. Though this machine might fair decently well as a home media server or something to that end.

On the positive side: good on him for whipping out hand tools. Not many computer jockys dare stray far from CNC. The video itself is also very well done.

Edit: So it's not silent, it has fans on the GPU and CPU heat sinks.

I really don't understand why he went with rope trim. Aluminum banding would have looked much cleaner imo.

[u/fizban7]

I like it and a "silent" pc(and every other appliance I have) is a dream

[u/quantumcatz]

Pfft you guys are so bitchy. It looks amazing

[u/FearTheDears]

Are we not going to mention that he built a gaming PC and plans to use a wireless card!?

[u/SC2sam]

The only thing I don't like is that it seems like he used thermal paste on the heat pipe he bent himself instead of brazing it. You want to braze it since that's a much better thermal conductor that won't dry out over time, and it is also stronger. I could be wrong and he did braze it but that connection looks entirely too blackish gray to me and not silver enough for it to be brazing solder.

[u/justreadmycomment]

Nice coffee maker