I got myself a new mainboard and stuff, and I wanted to try it out. But instead of that ordinary procedure of temporarily placing the mainboard on top of the mainboard paper box and so on, why not something a bit more permanent?
I present to you — a piece of wood!
Fancy, right…
Drill some holes and insert some screws and nuts through it. As long as you stick to the ATX specifications, you’ll get that mainboard mounted.
I used M4 (4 millimetres) screws, which unfortunately are almost too thick for this purpose, but it was all I had at home in these lengths. M3 sized screws or ones with the same diameter as the 6-32 screws (~3.5 mm) would probably have been a much better fit, as this is what mainboard are usually fixed with in ordinary PC cases. M4 still works though, but it’s a bit tight.
At the other side of the board, placing some simple stick-on rubber pads helps keeping the board steady, which becomes necessary due to the screw heads.
The mainboard was obviously easy to mount this way. But what about a PSU and a HDD/SSD?
Just fasten some screws or nails to the board right next to different objects…
It’s not very pretty, but it’s quite useful. Nothing is permanently fixed – I can still replace all of the parts at any time without any tools and so on. Compared to placing the mainboard at the mainboard paper box and PSU/disk right next to it, this allows me to easily move around the whole setup.
BTW – this new Intel stock cooler is TINY. I guess a CPU with 35W TDP won’t be needing much more than this though.
Although the cooler is running in “silent mode”, the i5-4570T is still just around 30 degrees celcius. That’s the temperature while the CPU is basically idle, though. It also seems like the clock rate is just around 800MHz while its idling, clocked down from 2.9GHz. But I don’t mind – most of my computers are just idling – no need to waste power. 🙂
Very cool!