I stuffed a Ryzen 7600 and an RTX 4070 into an old 1990s Gateway tower case and the airflow was trash even with a 120mm fan. Taped a flexible dryer vent hose from the side panel to the CPU cooler intake and dropped my temps by 12 degrees while gaming. Anyone else tried weird ducting solutions for cramped sleepers?
I used to roll my eyes at people stuffing RTX 4090s into beige Dell Optiplex cases. Seemed like way too much effort for a punchline. Then my buddy Dave convinced me to try it with an old Compaq from 1998 that I found at a garage sale for 5 bucks. The look on my buddies' faces when I fired up Cyberpunk with ray tracing in that old hunk of plastic was absolutely priceless. Has anyone else had a convert moment like that?
I was unloading some boxes at the county dump last Saturday and this older fella sees me carrying out this beat up Optiplex tower. He starts yelling "Wait wait wait that case has good aluminum in it!" I just smiled and told him it's actually hiding a Ryzen 7600 and a 4070 inside. He didn't believe me so I popped the side panel off and his jaw just dropped. We ended up talking for like 20 minutes about old business PC cases being the best sleeper candidates. Anyone else run into people who think you're crazy for keeping old e-waste looking boxes?
I used to be dead set on gutting old power supplies and putting new guts inside them for sleeper builds. Thought it was the only way to keep that authentic look. Then my buddy Mike showed me his old Compaq tower last week. He had this ancient 250 watt unit in there powering a Ryzen 7 and an RTX. The plastic around the 24 pin connector was all browned and one of the caps on the secondary side was bulging. He said he smelled ozone for a week before he caught it. That got me thinking about how these old PSUs weren't made for modern loads or any kind of safety standards. Now I just hide a modern gold rated unit in the bottom and run extensions. Nobody sees it anyway once the side panel is on. Has anyone else had a close call trying to reuse an old power supply?