August 22, 2023
Description
If you have been following my Xeon Phi experiments, you know that I've been having some fun playing around with these old compute cards. Recently thanks to a post on the homelab subreddit, I have managed to get my hands on an incredibly rare Xeon Phi x200 series coprocessor. Due to this being a different revision of Phi from my previous experiments though, I can't install it into my existing system. As such I have come to a need for a new server (again).
My previous case was an old Antec 3U unit I found used nearby and has been working perfectly. The best part of it being that it supports full height PCIe cards! Sadly however, this was a fluke of a find, and anything similar new here is just far too expensive to justify buying. Not to mention that there aren't many options supporting full height cards in a 3U case. Normally you could use a 4U case and call it a day, but unfortunately for me, I am out of rack space. With only 3U left, I had to find a solution
Luckily for me, I built an MPCNC a while back, and this was a perfect use for it! I began designing my own 3U case to be made out of cheaply available 1/4" (6mm) MDF, spare parts, and have it be completely customizable!
B.O.M
More details can be found on my website (https://aidancrowther.com/project/customcase)
License:
Creative Commons — Attribution
Aidan Crowther
