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Comment by indemnity

14 days ago

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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indemnity

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esperent  14 days ago

> 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?

  • indemnity  14 days ago

    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

    • esperent  14 days ago

      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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