daparkvid
Description
I was cleaning up some storage and ran into my perfectly functioning Wii wondering if I could make use of it somehow. Having seen so many awesome small form factor builds I got inspired to see what I could squeeze in. I looked online and only saw one build where they took an intel NUC and put it inside. But for this project I wanted a desktop CPU, and for it to look and feel like a wii as much as I could make it.
I gutted everything and used a rotary tool to cut and sand off most of the plastic standoffs and the rear for the i/o shield. Some of the standoffs were used later to screw down some plastic holders I cut and glued together. The front button electronics were unfortunately soldered on the wii board itself so I did use a couple of buttons from elsewhere and positioned them with a plastic holder. Power and reset buttons work as well as a power led. I really wanted to use the leds on the wii disc slot from the motherboard hdd activity header but it wasn't enough current to be visible. I used bits of insulation foam strips that I had lying around as standoffs and cushioning to prevent damage internally.
Motherboard The Wii is roughly 215x157x44 mm (8.5x6.2x1.7 in) which meant that ITX boards wouldn't fit. STX should fit comfortably at 147x140 mm except for the fact that I wanted the rear I/O at the back, right where the Wii has a cut away corner that limits the space even more. Had to make a notch into the case to allow the mobo to get as close as possible to the back and also cut into one of the corner screw posts. I got the asrock stx kit since it was cheaper overall (kit includes power adapter and wifi/bt adapter) and there just aren't that many options.
CPU Went with a pentium since this was more for the fun of building but would like to get an i5/i7 in the future
Cooler I reckoned that the motherboard and cpu would come up about 8-10mm, leaving around 30mm for cooling. Again, not many options at that height and I went with the silverstone nt07-115X. When I first ran it inside the case, the temperature rose dangerously hot (in the 90s at idle) and I did resort to drilling holes for airflow. This brought temps way down (40 idle, 62 load). Noise is acceptable, just don't run it anywhere close to 100% (max rpm is 3400). Also the paste it came with was rather shoddy so I did have to use something else.
RAM Hallelujah it fits.
Storage Adata sx8200 feels super snappy and probably one of the best $/performance nvme drives out there. The 500gb hdd was just an old laptop drive I had lying around that I was happy to see that it fits between the RAM and the case front.
RegretsReflection
One thing I wish I did was flipping the internals and having the motherboard on the other side panel. I could have kept the top flaps with their original hinges and possibly able to have front usb ports under the little panel at the front with the sd card slot. I did consider some noctua 40mm fans instead of drilling the holes for airflow but I did not have an easy way of powering the fans and I would have to give up the hdd.
TLDR: I wanted to see if I could build a pc in a wii.
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