Mijn probleem
My wireless headphones battery died. So I connected the 3.5mm cable to my All In One computer
Because I was so used to wireless, I stood up to go get some water, forgetting the cable was attached. The PC was yanked and fell face first onto the floor, smashing the screen. Rather than repairing it, I decided to create what is now known as FrankenPC
Mijn oplossing
I gutted the AIO, and screwed all the parts to a wooden board, which I screwed to a small side table someone threw out. This I placed under my desk. I acquired an external monitor, and the PC booted. I upgraded from 4 to 16GB RAM, and replaced the thermal paste. This was FrankenPC 1.0
Later on, the PC developed problems with age. Eventually, it was too slow and unreliable and had too many bottlenecks to rely on for modern use. So I don’t use it anymore
But the specs were still fairly good. I couldn’t give up just yet. I disassembled my Frankenstein mess, and looked at the components. I decided. I wasn’t done yet
Since I got a new computer, I now knew I could risk more crazy experiments on this without a worry. I removed the destroyed LCD, and the PC refused to boot without it. Annoying. I disassembled the LCD and found the screen was connected to a board that spanned the width of the LCD and was mounted at the bottom. I removed the LCD from this board. I connected the board by itself. The PC booted
But since it spanned the width of the entire 24” LCD, it was still annoyingly big
So I decided to bring out the hacksaw and sawed the board cleanly in half. I reconnected it. It booted
Now I had something that was only 2mm wider than the motherboard. Way more promising
I removed the dedicated GPU, since the GeForce MX110 was terrible anyway, and it just took up extra space. I removed the HDD, since it was more power and noise. 1TB sounds good, but since this is no longer a daily driver, the 128GB NVMe should do. I also removed the DVD drive since no-one uses those anymore
I screwed my new assembly with removed parts to a much smaller wooden board, around the size of a medium-large notebook. The motherboard fit. I screwed and glued everything else. I found more pieces of wood to build some walls. And I realized I had a problem - the heatsink was huge, and very awkwardly shaped. The single copper heat pipe was made to cool the CPU and GPU with one fan. I couldn’t fit it into my mini build
So I scavenged my parts bin, looking for any laptop with a heatsink way smaller. But I found something better. A radio from my dads car
Dad has a Ford Expedition 2012, and he isn’t very happy with it anymore. One day the radio jammed and the CD was stuck inside. He tried everything to get it out, but eventually gave up and installed a new CarPlay Dashboard. I took the old radio for parts. And it had a much lower profile heatsink. One 10cm x 10cm square of finned aluminium, rather than a 30cm x 15cm curvy pipe
I installed it with the original fan, and added new thermal paste, then finished the wooden case with holes for ventilation and a power button. This was FrankenPC 2.0
And it worked. Surprisingly, the radio heatsink kept the CPU 20 degrees cooler (Celsius) than the original heatsink did!
My end result is a 2.6L build with an i7-9700T, Intel UHD 630 Graphics, 16GB DDR4, and 128GB NVMe SSD
I do plan on making a 3D printed custom shell in the future, and maxing out the CPU and RAM, to make FrankenPC 3.0
For now, new life has been breathed into a PC that otherwise would have ended up in landfill
Mijn advies
Sometimes, if something is not worth fixing - either by not being economically viable, or because there is too much effort involved and it’s too old - then scavenge old parts and try come up with a creative solution to revive it.
My example is a PC with too many issues being converted into a mini server which I can use to host minecraft servers or power other DIY projects away from my main setup
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