I figured I should start since it's my thread.
mrgreen
Excuse some of my shoddy camera work though. Apparently I have early symptoms of Parkinsons ( j/k )
I had a tiny little Mini-ITX HTPC last year that served its purposes but fell short when the need for living-room PC gaming arose. I wanted something reasonably powerful, fairly compact, but completely silent.
I went with a Silverstone SG02-F chassis.
Micro-ATX board, full size power supply. This is the kind of system I could have built:
But I wanted something quieter. I didn't want fans spinning up when it was under a load. I thought that I would need a bigger CPU cooler than I would be able to fit in there normally. But that would mean I would have to do something else with the power supply.
Well I don't need this drive cage...
...so I ripped it out and installed a 300W Seasonic TFX PSU.
But I didn't want a cord to just be hanging out of a massive gaping hole where a power supply should be; I still wanted it to look and function as stock. So I improvised.
I cut out the back of a cheap power supply and soldered a power cable to the AC port. That allowed me to fit a Cooler Master 212 with ease.
I needed a silent graphics card, so picked up a passively cooled Radeon 6850.
But it bumped up against the Hyper 212, so I had to rotate its orientation.
I added some fans just to keep everything cool. It didn't technically need it as the chassis has good ventilation overall, but I wanted better control of temps. Cable management is a total nightmare though as there is no where to shove all of that cabling and the PSU cables are remarkably long. Add to this that every fan is connected to some sort of fan controller or resistor.
I achieved my objectives though. It looks stock, runs nice and cool, and I've been very happy with it.
I planned on working on it tonight (hence what inspired the thread) so I can post additional/better pics if anyone is interested.