It's been a while! As I am want to do, my flights of fancy have brought me to complete another build over the span of several years. Slowly, I've been acquiring interesting parts for an SFF build that I can travel with. One month, it may have been a motherboard purchase on eBay. several months later, some RAM, you get the gist. So over the span of about two years, I had acquired enough odds and ends to finally make myself say, "Fuck it, let's just finish it." So I did! But... not without a lot of gnashing of teeth and swearing at a buy now button. Lemme spin you a yarn. Buckle up, it's a long one.

As anyone with past experience will tell you, building an SFF computer is a challenge. Parts acquisition, limitation, and just getting the thing built, are all an extra notch in difficulty. I then decided it would be nice to make it harder by trying to build in this fuckin' thing, the Velkase Velka 5. It's a beautiful amalgamation of 1.2mm black powder coated steel, and it's outer volume is only 5.14 litres. 4.92 litres internally. Lemme put that into perspective for you by way of features.

This case can fit:

• A 270mm 2 slot graphics card
  
• a Flex ATX PSU
  
• 37* CPU Cooler (*more on this later)
  
• 42mm RAM clearance

On the market right now, as shown by the SFF PC Master List (absolutely incredible resource), in terms of outer volume, it is ranked 152nd. In terms of size per features, there is NO other case that offers similar specs. There's the NFC S4 Mini Classic (Discontinued, only supported up to 203mm graphics cards), Midori 5L (discontinued, only supported up to 257mm graphics cards) and Velka's 2.0 model (also obviously discontinued). This thing is jamming so much power into such a tiny PC, it's absurd. People have stretched this case out further than I have, but I feel I did pretty well in fleshing out the internals of this PC, which caused me not a small amount of stress.

It started out honestly pretty smoothly. Having actually already assembled in the case before, I knew what to expect and what I needed to acquire. Cables straight from the source (ADT-Link), a custom modular Flex-ATX PSU from Taobao, you get the gist. Assembly started at a family table of all things, with my dad, and the rest of the family watching and talking amongst themselves. We got the mobo attached to the inner gubbins of the case, and had to do some home surgery on the pcie riser cable to make it fit. The strands were bound in a circular cord rather than flat, and it made it too fat to fit and fold the way it needed to. It got late so we had to stop and pack it away half done. A couple days later I finished it up on the couch, and it looked great! Looked great, but ran? No, not at all, not even a blip outta it. In fact, all I got was a faint smell of magic smoke and immediately tore into it.

The first (?) issue was the PSU. Not the fact that it came directly from taobao, no, their work was honestly immaculate. It was actually a mod I attempted to it. See, waaaay back when I first got it in 2022, I also got a modboard that turned the simple 12v the PSU was supplying for it's fan into a PWM signal for a nicer fan. A modboard that also came from Taobao. A modboard that had very... unhelpfully translated instructions. Basically, it didn't work, fried itself on the 12v, and took the little noctua fan with it. I'm honestly not sure if I did something wrong or if something was wrong with it, but I believe it was shorted, causing the PSU to go into some form of limp mode until I fixed it. After a cable elongation surgery, I had a new fan wired in. Testing showed it worked after that. Tangent, I'm not sure whether to call it full or semi modular, because technically it is fully modular in the sense that all the cables are removeable. But it isn't because the SATA cable is directly pinned with the mobo power cable, which is against the spirit of fully modular. Fight in the comments below.

After that, I had a small snafu with the CPU Cooler, specifically it's fan. It rubbed up against the case while it ran, making a chirping noise. No bueno, but an easy fix. Gluing some nylon washers to the four corners of the CPU fan spaced it out enough from the blades to stop any contact, even with the case in motion (just like real babies, it's probably ill-advised to shake your baby PC).

Next was several nightmares involving my graphics card, the ADT-Link cables, and other issues. For context, the 3070 for this build I had from the whole graphics card shortage during COVID. I bought it "cheap" at the time (it was at MSRP rather than hiked to hell) from a little eShop called AntOnline, specifically for it's size, and for another fact I'll talk about in a sec. Due to delays, I actually ended up buying an entire PC to pull it's components, including the graphics card, expressly for the previous Velka case build I mentioned. Therefore, I had this 3070 now in surplus. So I did what anyone with an extra card would do, and started fuckin' with it. I deshrouded it, and installed two 12mm thin Kaze fans from Scythe, bringing the cards width within 2 pcie slots. I acquired a cool cable from GPUConnect Shop on ebay that let me plug into the 5-pin header on the card. With an additional Noctua PWM fan splitter, I was good to go with 240mm of fan!

So, great, I have a tastefully modded Graphics card that should cool itself, even in the restricted space of this case. Except not at all, no, in fact, its thermals were garbage. If it was put under any load, and I'm talking like opening League of Legends, it's hot spot temp would immediately shoot to the moon, throttle at 105°C, and start smelling like melting electronics. The fans are running full tilt, so they aren't the issue, so what the fuck? I break into it and try to figure out what's going on. This testing took weeks, where I was entirely frustrated, being thwarted at seemingly every turn. I re-pasted it, didn't work. I replaced all the thermal pads, nadda. It eventually took shining a bright ass flashlight under it and using my minds eye to see if the heatsink was making contact with the GPU. This turned out to be the issue, it was making some contact, but not enough. So, I ordered the thinnest copper shims I could find on Amazon (0.3mm) and waited. And waited... For a week. One no-show package, an angry buy now, and two more days later, they arrived. So I get to disassembling, thermal paste applying, laying this thin copper shim down, applying more thermal paste, closing it up, and testing. I burn the thing with Furmark and (drum roll)... Success. Thermals on the hotspot while being tortured by the furry doughnut were capping at 85°C, which is perfectly acceptable to me.

Funnily enough (not really, this was miserable), this coincided with my other PC's 3070 also having terrible thermal issues, also caused by the GPU not making good enough contact with the heatsink. That one took 3 shims and so much disassembly to test, I lost count. It's still not solid, but that's a different story. So basically for weeks I was without a computer, or I had a minorly functioning computer, between two of them.

BUT THAT'S NOT ALL FOLKS. All the while, during testing, I haven't mentioned a background issue I had been ignoring... and that was the video feed was spazzing out. Artifacting, disconnecting from the screen, different shades and "scan-lines." You name it, this thing was doing it, and I was hoping beyond hope that it would fix itself with the temp being chilled. But noooo, I finally get it good to go on temp, and the video feed was still spazzing out. So... what the fuck, what is it now? Turned out, it was the ADT-Link cables. I disconnected them in my testing, just to remove variables, and suddenly my screen connection was rock solid. I think the way I had to bend them to get them to both plug in and sit properly for the case to close messed with their fragile lil wires. Or there is some EMI. Or cosmic rays, I don't really know, but as soon as I pulled them out and connected directly to the graphics card, we were in business.
Fuck. Yea.

So that's my saga about building a PC. It's not new, and it certainly wasn't easy, but it's mine, and once I throw a handle on it, it's gonna be fully sick and ready for the road. I also got this really cute and honestly quite powerful portable monitor to go along with it on trips and stuff, and the two together look so adorable. So, enjoy the photos, enjoy my misery, and keep building!