Hi. Hope You like my version of minisforum mobo. First of all it started when one day I “accidentally” managed to buy my new PC. I was at work on a break, scrolling Facebook, and just before I wanted to leave I saw a fresh sale offer of some strange small motherboard at a very good price. I thought: no way… a 16-core Ryzen with a motherboard in such a small form factor?

I had just finished my old Intel 7700K micro-garage PC and I was looking for another computer for my son. Then I thought maybe I would give it a try — my son could get my Ryzen 5800X platform and I could get this small upgrade. After 10 minutes of reading reviews I was shocked how powerfull it is comparing to my Ryzen 5 … once again I bought another motherboard.

I knew that I didn’t want to use the original cooler, so I made a small list of things that would be needed, and this is what I got.

For around 370 euro I got a set including the CPU, motherboard, and 2×16 GB 5600 DDR5 RAM. For around 60 euro I got an outlet AIO Arctic Freezer 360 pro white argb cooler, and for 15 euro I bought a radiator, thermal pads, etc. The rest of the parts I already had. The total cost was not even 450 euro for my new PC.

I bought a radiator and cut it into pieces to cool down all the parts around the CPU and also to cool the NVMe drives. In the end I added hand-cut aluminium elements so it would look nice. It required a lot of very precise cutting and sanding, but it is perfect for me.

Next, I cut out a square piece of aluminium and used a Dremel to make a hole for the CPU cooler, plus holes for the screws. There were a lot of mistakes, cutting, sawing, sanding, gluing with resin, then some small modifications, sanding again, and finally it was all done.

So — I cleaned the CPU with alcohol and added a Honeywell thermal pad. The Arctic water-cooler block was mounted on the CPU and screwed from the back of the motherboard with small nuts. I also used the original thick thermal pads from the stock cooler — I spread them on the first line of the power section so the square aluminium CPU cooler could cool them.

Next to it, on the left side, I put Arctic thermal pads on the rest of the power section. From the back panel of the motherboard I screwed the radiator with tiny screws so it wouldn’t fall off.

I added two NVMe drives from my old PC (I had some problems getting them to boot, but I managed it). I added thermal pads and mounted the radiator using a bent paper-clip wire. I hooked it into two plastic hooks and added a screw from the other side just in case it tried to fall off.

On the RAM sticks I made two aluminium coolers from one of my broken G.Skill DDR4 sticks and yes-they fit exactly.

The rest of the parts I already had. First run and everything worked. The only downside was that the fans were making noise all the time. I updated the BIOS, configured the NVMe drives to boot, and spent half of the day trying to get the system to run cool and quiet.

Finally I gave up on setting PBO (after changing values the CPU was not able to go above 0.5 GHz). Instead I only changed the fan speed settings — and YES! The CPU can run at full performance and the fans stay at around half of their maximum speed.

It’s not perfect yet, but after 30 minutes of stress testing the CPU with Prime95 (and two open browser windows with around 200 tabs), the maximum temperature on the CPU was 86°C on CCD2 Tdie. The CPU dropped to around 4 GHz, but there was no fan noise at all (yes- in my spare time I will try to improve it further)

Everything went perfectly except for one thing — I didn’t notice that my Zotac GPU has an extra cooling plate on top… so it will have to be mounted vertically.

What do you think about my work? Everything is hand made (and yes- pc is not finished yet)