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November 11 2013

After looking at the progress so far for a bit more I could see that the height of the whole assembly could be reduced significantly without a whole lot of work. So about two hours or so were spent dropping things down a size.

Here you can see that there is still about 23mm of room to the top of the RAM.

But here there is only about 17mm to the top of the CPU block retention screw. The obvious thing to do here is drop the height down to the top of the RAM, and make some room in the GPU plate for the screws.

So to that end, the risers were shortened 22mm. Only a little re-shaping of the ends was needed and of course some new holes for the hinge bar screws also had to be drilled.

A comparison at left to see how much lower the GPU will sit above the motherboard.

The location of the water block screws was found in relation to the GPU plate and marked.

And then these areas were removed and cleaned up.

Fortunately there was just enough room next to one of the GPU card fixing screws, but there would not have been a problem if the card only had three fixing points. On Cor leonis the GPU card is held at only three points and this is ample.

The only part that had to be completely re-made was the locking riser. This was very simple and quick to make.

And here is what the location and parts looks like.

Now the total height is about 102mm. Comparing this to Cor leonis, where the combined height of the components was about 80mm shows that the culprit is the massive heat sink on the GPU. But as mentioned before, water cooling the GPU is not an option here.

And some pics of the complete unit. It doesn’t look a whole lot different from the previous version, but it is a little more compact now.

The photo at right shows that this is the lowest that I can go with this design. Here there is about 2mm of room above the PCI riser cable and connectors. A solution to this would be to move the risers back a little, away from the connector, re-designing the GPU tray (with some bends for the lock at the other end etc). But then problems start to arise with the sata and USB connectors. I think this is the lowest I can go.