Converting Mini-ITX Desktop to 1U Server

Hi, I'm Ryan with Warner Discovers and today I'm going to show you how to convert my

mini

itx

desktop

to an oneu rack computer. I definitely ran into a number of issues and I'm showing you all the steps I took. I ended up having issues with motherboard fitment, cpu cooler, io shield and a variety of wiring issues, I learned a lot along the way about

converting

from

desktop

to oneu

server

. It's definitely clear to me now that there are specific

mini

itx

server

s. I highly recommend looking into it if you're going to try to make something similar, but I'm very happy to move on to this U size case.

I've pulled it off the shelf a few times and it's very easy. just unscrew the front here, slide over the top and make whatever changes you want. This is the case for the nwin rf1 100s and it comes with a power supply and if you want to see the unboxing I do it in this other video. I'll also link all the things I used in the video below anything to help anyone do the conversion feel free to ask me any questions and I hope this helps so I have the rf1 100's here this is open. I am about to. change the internals so I can have the io on the front as well as the US B on the front and then put this on the back, so first I'm going to remove the ears here, so I changed the ears on the rack and I rotated it, The next thing I'm going to do referring to the PDF is this is the same address and they have steps here and which one to do and next I'm going to take out the power supply and remove the control module and then I changed those two positions so I took out the three screws here from the power supply and there were also two screws under here that I removed and now this is loose, so I removed the other three screws here for the control module and now this is coming out.

Here and then we can change the position so that the control module relies on the fans here and what they suggest next is to unscrew the wall of the fan and reverse it to change the flow. As you can see here, we swapped it, so I'm going to change this. An interesting feature. I haven't really played with many server cases, but you can easily take out the fan this way and swap them in there, which is very convenient, so I took out the two screws on the side, turned it over and now the air is coming out.

The flow is reversed as you suggest and now I'm going to install the power supply and the control board properly, so I have the control module installed here and you can see that the USB is at a pretty decent angle. I think this should be fine, I also think you could probably reverse them so they are upside down. You know I think this should be fine and if it was the other way around it would go straight to the motherboard so I'm going to see if this can tell just being situated with the front connectors is also going to be tight so I reversed the fan .

I got the power supply where the controller module is so they swapped so now the back of the board. It will be facing the front with the controller board and everything is rotated according to the instructions. I have a slight concern with the Nest power supply here, but we'll have to see what we get into when we put the motherboard inside. Okay, so I have my current server, you can see here, the io Shield may not fit there, so I don't know if I'm going to modify it. Let's get ready to take this apart and put it there.

Well, we take out the motherboard. ready to get in here, gotta change the cpu cooler. I have a smaller 65 watt Silverstone which is a low profile which should fit this case based on my research and then I have another Ram device that will go here because it had Another slot open so I thought that might be it too so I pulled the io Shield like I was talking about in the other video and you can see it's too tall to get in here the motherboard will slide in here but I could just get some tin snips and cut the top off so I ended up having to modify this IO shield , I cut the side a little bit, the top a little bit and now I'm just going to have to glue it here and then on the base plate.

I can just push it in, it looks fine, but it's going to look fine for the most part here, so I installed the motherboard. I put in the new CPU fan. I had to modify the backplate because of this motherboard. which is really annoying and then I have the io Shield on there we will be connecting a bit more of this so due to an oversight on my part this board only has one chassis fan so I will need a splitter to connect several. Don't think about it, so I have everything inside, I have the hard drive, the hard drive cables are very tight, a little line here definitely fits well, so this is the case in operation, these fans are very loud, which I was a little surprised, but you can.

See the cropped IO board or the IO shield and um, yeah, here it is on the uprooted rack. See I have the E wire to the switch right here. Hard drive LED. I couldn't keep this plugged in. It's too much. angle, so I'll have to go back there. I think I'll have to get an adapter or something, but that's it, so I pulled the server out again. The fans are so loud that I have it in the server room behind. a closed door and I can still hear it so I ordered some new Noctua fans and they will replace them both.

I also have a splitter that I think they already come with and then I also have a USB flex cable to try and connect it to. on the front because I couldn't connect it to the board and get it to flex well enough to sit there so we'll see what we can do so I'll show you one more time how loud these fans are. I have it plugged in right now before I changed them, so just looking at these Noctua fans I can see that it has a braided cable and it's basically going to go to the original bracket, so we won't have these separate cables here and there.

There would be an adapter here so you wouldn't have to keep that other one, that other Y splitter, so normally this fan was running at about 13,000 RPM and now using this low noise adapter, it's now running at 6500 RPM, great, like this that a few things I've learned here we have this low noise adapter from the Noctua fans that I can put this fan basically at half reduction it runs at about 6,500 instead of the 13,000 I was getting and then if I actually put this splitter on noise reduction and I plug it in two fans, both run at about 30 3300 RPM, essentially both having power, so at this point I think I'm going to order two pwm fans that can be controlled from 1000 RPM to 1500 RPM, so Mainly the problem here is that the 40 4028 fans that are included are not four pin, they are only three pin, so they cannot be controlled and that means they will run at full speed all the time, so I can use this divider to have them and have two. fans running at about 6500 RPM and the noise was fine or I can order two fans that are four pin pwm and controlled so I'll have to evaluate what I want to do here but for now I could use the splitter to have the power up and run both at 6,500 RPM and see what the noise is like.

I'll also move this hard drive here because I definitely am. This is definitely a tight space situation and is obviously a unique case, so it will definitely be tight. Okay, so I have both fans on a splitter, you can hear them running. I didn't reduce the power. It must be something with the fan speed reduction. You can hear the two fans running and they are running at 1290 1300 RPM at this point. I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I could get a low noise adapter that reduces it by 40-50%, put it online here and make the two fans, but I don't know exactly what that means. terms of fan speed at the end and I can't control it, alternatively I could order two new 4 pin pwm fans which I think I could do because if this splitter is going to work and control them at the same speed then it's probably better. stop doing that and being able to adjust it, this has been quite a journey trying to figure this out, just keep running into bumps in the road and, um, yeah, I'll probably talk about that at the end, for now I moved the 3 and 1/2. on the R drive from here to here I can see why the other oneu cases might have a little more flexibility in terms of space, but for now if I had to fit another hard drive I would definitely do two and a half and get a smaller one . static cables um I have an extension here for the front USB I zip tied the front control board over here I zip tied the USB 3.0 right here I had the fans away from the fans over here zip cable set this PCI Express slot was definitely interfering a little bit with the 3 and 1/2 units here, so I'm definitely going to know, I'd probably just consider the 2 and 1/2 units if I had to do something here, so I've got some new stuff here. two of the four pin fans I ordered to replace these fans run at maximum RPM so we'll see how they go.

I have a couple of new SATA cables that are shorter because I don't like the length of this one of these. it's a left left angle one of these is a right angle so hopefully I can replace some of these in a more organized way. I also have some shorter straight cables if they don't work the way I like and then I also have this interesting SATA adapter that has different angles so you can basically plug them in and then have a completely different angle to approach it since it's such a sharp turn for above the height you can see it's a little bit pressed, but I don't.

I don't think this slot is going to work because of this heat block here, so we'll see what we find, so this SATA adapter didn't work with the heat block. I thought there might not be enough room, but it was worth a try and I had never seen them before. This SATA cable pack, the short SATA cables I bought have a smaller head, so they're a little more flexible as well, so the height clearance is definitely more tolerable here than something I've already seen. It had to be a little stiff and all that. It also had this left and right angle.

This works, but I don't think it's worth keeping at this point. I think I'll probably end up using two of these and returning the angles. but it's good to know they have these. I wish they had one I could find, but it was out of stock and it actually goes immediately right or immediately left. For some reason no one is making them right now, so I bought the shorter St. of cables there should be a lot better than the ones tied up here and then I have these new Arctic 40x 40x 28 fans that fit into the stand unlike the noctua and then this piece will go on top of that and I have the second one here and We'll see how they work so we have the two fans here.

I'm just going to hold them. This is the fan. Will put this in the description and we'll see how they work with the r RPM. Okay, so we got the fans running and I adjusted the fans in the Bios here so you can see that the chassis fans are running at 5200 RPM. The CPU fans are running at 3400. If I go to optimization, you can see that the CPU fans are running at standard only. and the chassis fans are silent, if I set it to standard they will start right now. I think you know 5200 will be fine.

I will take some kind of monitor for the motherboard temperature. Right now it's at 24, but I think this should be fine if it makes you know higher than what you know, these specific temperatures will go up anyway. I think it will be fine, keep an eye out if I do standard, it will increase by a pretty significant amount, definitely. It wasn't as loud as the last ones, but they do sound loud, yeah, I think leaving it at standard should be good, we'll see how it goes, so I'm back to having the super quiet server just as I expected it to probably be running. at 5,000 to 6,000 RPM and if it needs to go higher it has the speed to do it, I think it can go up to 14 15,000 RPM which is great but now I can't hear it when you know I'm outside. of this room, so the S has been working great with all the components and is very neat, but one of the things I really didn't like was that the CP cooler was bending the motherboard because I had to modify it. underneath because it wasn't really flush, so I ended up finding a Mini ITX server motherboard that fit my current processor on eBay for a pretty good price and then found the right CPU cooler that I should probably use for an oneu system.

I'll show it here, so I have the new miniitx server motherboard. You can see there are a variety of dual gab ethernet USB 3.0 ports and then we have the diatron K2 which will replace the low profile cooler and then I have some new RAM to put in. here since it's a different length so I have the new motherboard installed there's a little more room here uh the RAM is smaller so there's a little more roomclose to the fans, the 24 pin motherboard power cables here, so there is a little more convenient to plug in, as well as the other power cable, it has the two chassis fans that can be connected directly to the board base, so I no longer need this divider.

I also don't need this flexible USB 3.0 because there is no 3.0 here, so I could get an adapter for 2.0 to 3.0 so I can use these front USBs, but I have the new heatsink and will probably want to get a shorter SATA cable for this, since my other cable wasn't long enough, just short. So okay, we have the new motherboard up and running. See the BIOS here posted and booted into boont. I think there is a problem with Ethernet, I updated the motherboard. There may be some kind of configuration change, but I'll have to figure it out. but everything is working, what is also good is that we have two fans on the motherboard, now you can see each speed and how efficient it is, so here is the io shield with the new motherboard.

Fortunately, this IO shield fits and looks. really great much better than the cut aluminum I ended up making, very happy with this and it also has dual ethernet in case I want to go crazy. I doubt I will, so I'll probably end up ordering the shorter sta cable as well. like the USB 2.0 adapter just because it's there, why not? But for now see how it goes. Another big advantage that it didn't have before is the Lan LED which was not on the other motherboard with the server ITX boards, you do have Lan LED. one and two and it's cool that there's an indicator for that, which is a nice touch, so one of the last things I was going to do here was change these satellite cables, uh, this is too long, this one barely fits.

I have about 8 blue satellite cables which are very thin so I'll put them in there and change the front USB here unfortunately with a new motherboard it only has 2.0 so I have this adapter here plug it into the motherboard and this should go on that end, so I have the SATA cables connected here. 8 inch cables. I wish there was a 7 inch CU cable. Then it will be a perfect length. We have the 3.0 adapter here. the USB 2.0 header, so now both front USBs work, so I'm very happy with the way these things are laid out. It's really clean here, just keep this space quiet.

I would love to put more hard drives in here now that we have more. room with the 24 pin ATX power over here, the four pin over here is all stuck in this area, but then we have all the power connectors for the SATA over here, the fans are wrapped around themselves with one of them going over here and the other one is back here on the front and the new CPU cooler but I'm really happy with the way it's laid out so we're going to put it back in and probably won't take it out for a while so we've got the one that U all sorted with the last static cable and adapter I wanted to put in here, so I'm going to put this back in just to go over the problems you ran into, first of all the io Shield tried to modify it and that wasn't very happy.

With the look of it, I didn't think it would be okay, but I ended up having the issue of the motherboard power cable not fitting properly just because of the way some of these mobos servers are arranged? You can see with the The new one I bought, the 24 pin one, was on the right side, so it was much easier to put everything in the front, here, closer to the power supply, and then everything else was freed up around the fans and all that when buying the. Obviously I bought the wrong new 40mm fans that were not compatible with the 40x 40x 28 fans that come here.

I also didn't realize that the fans were only three pins instead of four and with the four pins you have speed control. for all those fans, especially with a mobo server that has multiple chassis fans for the mini ITX so they can be controlled once you have the new fans, it sounds great running between 6 and 7000 RPM instead of something like 14 000 RPM. which sounded very loud, another problem with this CPU cooler. I got a low profile CPU cooler which again I will link all in the description. The CPU cooler worked great when I installed it, but I had to cut off the bottom because there was an issue with the bottom of the motherboard and how it was mounted specifically for this processor.

I was looking for the pin type CPU cooler, so once I found the new Oneu cooler, which I will also link below, it had the pins and was a great height, everything worked better. I still had to push the CPU cooler onto the motherboard before screwing it in because I was running into a bit of a fit at the bottom, but once I had the cooler screwed in. the motherboard was totally fine so after configuring most of it i got annoyed with the io shield and then i started looking for new motherboards and at that point i decided that luckily i would switch to the motherboard.

I'm running Linux and swapping CPUs, RAM, and processors, and that all seems pretty clean, so basically the only thing left here from this was actually the processor and hard drives, meaning everything else I needed to get. new RAM for the motherboard because they were short units, like such dim RAM units that go here, so I couldn't use them anymore, but I'm definitely happy I took the leap now that I know and I hope this helps anyone who has similar problems or Looking for some specific equipment, I definitely liked finding jetway motherboards which is one of the ones I chose, I found one on eBay and they have some kind of long term support so I think the motherboard I bought on eBay will still have support until like 2030 for this 6th gen Intel processor I have, so we'll continue to look for them in the future, easily upgradeable if I want to move up to something like 11th or 12th gen Intel or anything in the future, but this was quite a Learning Journey and I'm definitely glad I was playing with this stuff so let me know if you have any questions and thanks for watching.