Definitely the bottom one. I have a totally black PC case and one of the case fans has a power cable that’s extended using 2 taped together GPIO cables from my raspberry pi kit. There’s also a hard drive in there that hasn’t been working for 1 year at least
The one hard drive that doesn't work just sitting there is a true testamnet to my false hope. I swapped my psu a year ago and accidentally fried my 2tb hard drive. I got a new rig this summer and still transferred it over and plugged it in with the hope that it would resume life, only for it to be truly dead. It is still sitting in the new rig lol, couldn't be bothered to remove it after testing.
I have a black windowless case to, my hdd is ironicly in the place where the hdd case was put in for shipping purposes (chilling next to the psu). Also I used an anchient 2+4pin pigtail cable together with a 8pin cable to power the gpu.
These days, the top. Pretty close to it, too–other than the hardline tubing, that’s about what my gaming setup looks like.
I’ve also ran systems in the past where the “case” is the box the motherboard came in, and you started it by tripping the switch header with whatever piece of metal was handy. Good times.
There was the guy on reddit a week or so ago that was the fusion of these. Ran a custom cooling loop up his wall into the AC vent and got insanely low temps.
I just recently (a year ago) pulled my Phenom II x6 out of the old AT case to put in a Dell ATX, and bought a modern power-supply-on-bottom ATX case from Montech for like $100 because it had 6 RGB case fans preinstalled with a glass side panel. I gave the Phenom II x6 to my daughter with a 970 GTX, and got a cheap X570 motherboard and Ryzen 5 3600x to throw in the case. Cost me about $300 all said and done, because I already had all the rest of the stuff. A friend from the local hackerspace gave me his “old” 3060 12gb, because he was upgrading to a 4090, and I couldn’t be happier. I feel like royalty rn even though I know it’s not the best machine out there, lol
But the RGB button stays off. And I use a BRICK of an air cooler, it’s like a knockoff Noctua D12
It’s perfectly possible to go full-blown overclocking with watercooling whilst not buying top of the range parts (which tend to be “twice the price for an extra 10% performance” deals) and not spending a cent in decorative elements such as turning your PC box into a lightshow.
In fact it absolutelly makes sense to get well selected parts from the high middle end of the consumer segment using knowledge about performance bottlenecks to select the right stuff to get more bang for the buck and pumping up performance further with overclocking using the right self-assembled cooling and tweaks to things like voltage supplied to the CPU.
I like to call it Intelligent Performance Aware PC Builder but calling it Tight-fisted Old Gamer would work too ;)
I’m very satisfied with my build but my main issues are cables. The cables of the two CPU fans are way too long so they hang in a pretty non aesthetic way. On the other hand, the cables of the fan headers are too short for me to put them in the back of the case so it has to just stay there below my GPUs. It’s awful.
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