Do-It-Yourself Wall-Mounted PC
I have a plan. Well, sorta…
I’VE SPOKEN in the past about my love for Ikea Skadis pegboards. I’ve got a few dotted around my office, holding everything from headphones, laptops, and PC hardware to a Nordic bearded axe (thanks, Pops!), my sports memorabilia, and even Warhammer paints, and it got me thinking: What if you could turn one into a PC case?
We’ve seen plenty of wall-mounted PCs, and there’s a ton of cases, too. Thermaltake offers one, and there’s a few from other manufacturers, but they’re usually pricey, cumbersome, tricky to put together, and covered with chunky glass. Traditionally, wall-mounted PCs were made from purpose-cut acrylic or similar, but technically, you could get a Skadis pegboard and convert it into a chassis quite easily. At least, that’s what my brain is telling me.
And that’s sorta what I think I’m going to do. Maybe not for next issue, but the one after. I’m going to take a white Skadis pegboard, spray it a custom color, create a mounting mechanism for a motherboard, pilfer some parts from the Hydra Mini (including its power button), then, hopefully, build one kick-ass wall-mounted PC.
There are some interesting things to consider. I’ll have to cut some of it out to allow breathing room for the AIO. I need to find a way of safely and securely fitting a GPU to it. I need to be extremely clever with cable management, and devise some solution to fit the PSU on there, too (whether that’s an SFX or full-size one, I’m still not sure). It’s also going to be a pain to shoot, but the photography team and I have a plan for that as well.
The brilliant thing about all of this is that you can get pegboards from Ikea in three different sizes: 14 x 22 inches, 22 x 22 inches, and 30 x 22 inches. That just
says ITX, M-ATX, and ATX builds to me! And even the biggest one is only $17, so if I go wrong, it’s not a huge loss of investment— and, of course, there’s a ton of different accessories I can cajole into being nifty cable management features and such, too.
Bad idea? Maybe. Problems to overcome? Definitely. Going to write up a heck of a feature on it? Absolutely.