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The blissful Zen of a good side project

(joshcollinsworth.com)
567 points ingve | 2 comments | 04 Apr 25 20:37 UTC | HN request time: 0.002s | source
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indemnity ◴[04 Apr 25 21:51 UTC] No.43588001[source]▶
My day job is soul destroying chasing down JIRA tickets, hours long cross time zone coordination calls, tedious documentation writing, and 10% of the time, if I’m lucky, a little bit of code. It affords my family a great lifestyle, but to preserve my sanity, I have to have little side projects. In the last three months I have: - Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090).

- Really went hard into learning NixOS and nix to manage my environments across nixOS servers and Linux/Windows/macOS development machines

- Built a personal project to replace my usage of healthchecks.io with my own single executable Rust API server with embedded admin UI (learning React/Vite)

- Completely rebuilt my home network from scratch, redoing wiring, improving WiFi coverage with new APs, maxing out home network performance

- Switched to zed.dev with embedded Claude 3.5 Sonnet to speed up my learning and get me unblocked when working on something unfamiliar The freedom to over engineer the shit out of something, is the outlet I need to be calm about having to compromise a lot in my day job!

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esperent ◴[05 Apr 25 00:28 UTC] No.43589169[source]▶
> Built a beastly water cooled SFF (small form factor) desktop PC in the FormD T1 case (9950X3D, RTX 4090)

I've only got as far as watching videos and daydreaming but whenever I need to replace my current setup I plan to build a SFF PC. I've had my eye on exactly this case for a while.

How did the build go? Was it difficult? And how are the temperatures for the 4090? Can you run it at full power?

replies(1): >>43590167 #
indemnity ◴[05 Apr 25 02:40 UTC] No.43590167[source]▶
Final assembly was recent, but it took months of planning and research, mainly around being sure the components would fit in the tight tolerances of the FormD 2.1 9.95L case.

I wouldn't say it was difficult per-se, but it did have its challenges in understanding which pieces go where and what screws/standoffs to use where, since you build from the ground up, and for the 4090 I used, have to build it up around the GPU. For the first build, it took me probably a full day, but now I can strip and rebuild it in around an hour or two.

Also, the case - I had my heart set on the 2.1 case not the 2.5, since the 2.1 was a labor of love from the OG designer - It took freaking months to get my hands on the Titanium + Black version. My recommendation would be to favorite it on the Shopify store, and hit order the second you get the back in stock notification, they sell out in an hour or two.

I still screwed up my planning and had to get my custom cables remade to be shorter to give me more space, and had to deshroud my GPU to make it fit at the same time as the I/O headers.

I ordered both an air cooler and the AIO I now use, and tried both, in the end, I went for the AIO (accepting the higher GPU temps due to the radiator at the top), because I don't game as much and I want the 9950X3D to not throttle when doing Rust builds and other things that peg all cores at 100, and I didn't want to undervolt.

I can run the 4090 at full power, the PSU I have does amazingly well (Corsair SF750 SFX). However, I am switching it out for an SF1000 SFX soon, to give it a little more headroom, if I max out the CPU (170W TDP) and GPU (450W TDP), along with the other components, I am approaching the limits of the SF750, and it definitely couldn't handle a 5090 (a future project!).

Temperature wise, the 4090 maxes out at 60-70C for the games I play, and the CPU maxes out at around 80C for all-core workloads, idling at around 50C.

Not as good as a big ass desktop, but I came from a big ass desktop and I love this tiny dense powerhouse that is 6x smaller than my Fractal North XL predecessor :)

Photo (Logitech MX Master mouse for scale): https://imgur.com/a/lcS98IE

Best resources for this was the /r/FormD and /r/sffpc subreddits and Discord.

Parts list:

- CPU: AMD 9950X3D (originally a spare 7800X3D, 9950X3D was a recent swap-out)

- GPU: MSI Ventus 3X RTX 4090

- Motherboard: ASUS ROG X870-I (originally X670E-I)

- Memory: G-Skill Trident Z CL30 DDR6000 32GB (x2)

- SSD: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB (x2)

- PSU: Corsair SF750

- Cooling Option 1 (not used): Thermalright AXP90-X47 (Full Copper)

- Cooling Option 2: CoolerMaster Atmos 240 AIO

- Custom cabling: Ordered from DreambigbyRayMOD on Etsy

- GPU deshrouding kit: Ordered from Osserva on Etsy

- Fans: All Noctua for quieter noise profiles

- Case: FormD T1 2.1 Titanium + CNC machined black side panels

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1. esperent ◴[05 Apr 25 04:38 UTC] No.43590790[source]▶
Thank you for sharing, I'm gonna save this comment and come back to it. I'm in Vietnam and chose this case partly because it seems resellers do have it in stock here. It's all the other stuff - custom risers and cables - I'm worried about.

I'm gonna target a 4080/5080 - stuck with Nvidia because CUDA - which gives me a lot more wiggle room with the power supply.

I've built plenty of PCs, including a few SFF PCs without GPUs, but never something requiring this kind of customization so I'm planning to find a detailed build online and mostly copy what the other person did, if possible.

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2. indemnity ◴[05 Apr 25 08:11 UTC] No.43591820[source]▶
If you go for the 4080 or 5080, you will have a lot more options for sure. If you can find one, I would try get a 2/2.5 slot wide card, gives you so much more flexibility.

Bookmark this Excel, saves you a lot of time looking up specs: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AddRvGWJ_f4B6UC7_Ift...

You want a GPU no longer than 325mm (though exactly 325mm may be pushing it).

For the 4090 it was basically Founder's Edition or my card. FE was impossible to source (I am not in the USA), and I had to get the MSI card specially ordered in, the most common card was the ASUS ROG monster which at 357mm would never fit.

At 322mm, the MSI card barely fits (after deshrouding), there is like 2-3mm to spare length-wise. And you have to build in 3 slot mode if you want any clearance from the PSU (mount PSU on standoffs).

Before deshrouding, the GPU plastic covers mean you can't also plug in the USB-C I/O port.

Oh yeah, forgot about the riser cable.

The one that comes with the FormD case is serviceable, but depending on the motherboard. I believe it has issues with Gigabyte B760 and B650 motherboards.

I also have the LinkUp 19mm PCIe 5.0 V2 riser cable (https://linkup.one/linkup-ava5-pcie-5-0-riser-cable-future-p...), but it can only be used in air-cooled builds - it has a red tab at the top which blocks the radiator if you want to use it with watercooled/AIOs. See this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/sffpc/comments/1f5ij02/question_re_.... Some brave souls have hacked off the tab with a knife/scissors but you have to be careful not to cut the wires along with it :)

So I had to go back to the stock cable for the AIO flavor build, which has other issues (you have to fold it/squash it a bit at the bottom where it bends around below the motherboard, so that pressure on it doesn't cause it to make it pop out of the motherboard connector). Before you put on the bottom cover with the feet on it, the riser will touch the surface of whatever you are building on, and given enough time can cause the motherboard connector to loosen or pop out.

Had hours of debugging fun trying to figure out why it was starting to lock up while gaming, turned out to be the riser having wiggled loose from the motherboard.