Thrifty PC Building: Upgrading with Old Cases

Elijah discovers that upgrading an old PC case creatively can save hundreds while still achieving modern performance.

### Thrifty PC Building: Upgrading with Creativity and Savings
* 💻 Elijah initially questioned the decision to use an old case for a new gaming PC, but it turned out to be a **smart choice that saved money for upgrades** like a new CPU, SSD, and memory.
* 💡 Although older cases lack modern features like USB standards and aesthetic enhancements, the thriftiness of using them can lead to **significant savings over time**.
* 🔧 The process of finding a suitable case involved searching local electronics recyclers and Facebook Marketplace, highlighting the **importance of knowing case sizes and materials** for compatibility.
* 🛠 Many people may lack the tools for modifications, but options like **tool rentals and maker spaces** can assist in the DIY process, which is essential for achieving **custom features**.
* 🌬 Cooling solutions were discussed, including unconventional methods like using a **household fan** when traditional case fans couldn't be installed, showcasing **creative problem-solving**.
* 📜 A brief history lesson revealed that the **ATX standard has remained unchanged since 1995**, allowing modern components to fit into older cases, which is a testament to the **durability of PC design standards**.
* 🖥 The build ultimately accommodated high-end components, demonstrating that **older cases can effectively support powerful hardware**, although **cooling issues were initially encountered**.
* 📈 In conclusion, while new cases offer advantages, **reusing and modifying older cases** can be a **cost-effective strategy** for budget-conscious builders, allowing for **more significant upgrades elsewhere in the system**.

finally, the last part arrived for my brand new gaming PC. Elijah, Elijah, Elijah, wasting money again when you could have just used your old case or, better yet, this one that someone was just throwing away. Those things are older than I am. There's no way it's going to fit all my modern hardware. Really? Challenge accepted. See? Too easy. And with the money I saved, I upgraded your CPU, your SSD, and even your memory. Wow. But there must be a downside, right? Otherwise, why would companies continue to make cases? Okay, there are some downsides. Your old case is not going to have the latest USB standards. It's not going to have a fancy glass panel or nice cable management. It'll also probably make your rig look kind of worthless. But I see that as an absolute win. This kind of thriftiness can save you hundreds of dollars over time. So, I'll tell you what, Elijah. You come up with some fancy feature your new case has, and I'm going to make it happen on this one at a fraction of the price. Deal? But only if I can tell them about.

our sponsor G.Skill. Their Trident Z5 CK DDR5 CU DIM memory is designed for Core Ultra 200 series CPUs and features a built-in clock driver for support for up to 9600 megatransfers per second. Learn more at the link in the video description. Step one of saving money on a case is to get creative and get your hands on the cheapest possible canvas for your modding masterpiece. Local electronics recyclers can be a great bet, but if that fails, there's always Facebook Marketplace. Sorting from low to high, we're going to start there. After the usual runaround from jerks who label things free that aren't free, we were lucky enough to find not just one, but a handful of cases that would work. But do note that not all cases are made equal. For starters, you'll want to make note of the size so you can make sure that whatever parts you plan to use are going to fit. Also, materials. If you're going to have to modify your case, well, you'll want a material that your tools

can work with speaking of modifying my power supply is going to be suffocating up top. Most cases have vents now for it, and so does this one. It just doesn't know it [Music] yet. Look at that. Who says Shirro from the business team's the only one with a grill? His looks much nicer. No, I haven't goldplated it yet. Okay, now obviously most people are not going to have the tools at home to do something like this, but many hardware shops do allow rentals, and some cities even have maker spaces and tool libraries that you can use to help get the job done. Now I just need to cut these plastic strips off here and clean things up a little [Music] [Music] by the way. I fully acknowledge that we could have just had the intake fan on the bottom, but Elijah asked for a grill, and now he has one. I'm almost afraid to ask what you're going to do for my CPU and GPU, but here it goes. The case is sealed off at the front. Linus, how are

you going to cool that. Elijah does have a point. There's nowhere to mount case fans here. We'll talk more about that later, but for now, one trick that is very popular on r/techsupportmcgyver is just ripping the side panel off and then pointing a regular old household fan at the system. It's going to be just as effective. Now we're just about ready to start our build, but before we do, let's do a quick history lesson on why I expect all of my brand new parts to work in a case that's 20 years old. Adam, the computer guy, I'm so glad you asked. The ATX standard for motherboards was patented in 1995, and the mounting holes and IO locations of the three most common sizes, ATX, microATX, and Mini ITX, have remained unchanged since 1995. But don't let the secret get out. There have been other changes, like the motherboard power connectors and internal slots and headers, but none of them affect the shape of the board, so any board, as long

as it follows, the standard should fit in any old case, and it does. As you can see, the IO Shield goes here or doesn't for boards that have them built in. And nine quick screws later, we are G2G. Actually, uh, does it require a back plate for the CPU Cooler? Yes, it does. Ah, another feature we're going to need to add. Older cases didn't have a cutout to install a CPU back plate once you already had the motherboard in, but don't worry, I got you covered. Alright, ready? Yep. Yeah, come on, that was pretty cool. Yeah, okay, isn't that fantastic? Yeah, it looks pretty good. And if we wanted to avoid all that extra work, all we would have had to do was install this on the motherboard before we put it in the case like the old days. So, we installed it, took it out, cut the hole just to put it back to put this on. Yeah, now you have this feature, and look, it almost won't slice your hand open. This point in the video, I can't tell if I'm

on Team new case or team an old case. We're having fun though. Yeah, yeah. Maybe the cases, the friends are made along the way. Probably the wildest thing that hasn't changed is the pinouts for these front panel connectors. This HD audio connector, boom, still HD. Let's go. Same goes for my USB 2, as well as my front power switch, reset switch, and LEDs. But what about USBC? I want to charge my phone. Poor innocent Elijah, you weren't there for the good old days of PC Building when cases used to come with these bad boys, 5 and 1/4 in Bays, which for some inexplicable reason manufacturers still make accessories for. As tempted as I was by the fan controller, the hard drive caddy, and the literal drawer, I felt that this iio would better address Elijah's concerns. Type-C USB 3.2, two USB 3A ports, two USB 2 ports, and even front panel audio. Now, it's a fair criticism that buying one of these can cost as much as a case. Some of

them are pretty fancy boasting features like premium audio decks, but in the spirit of buying into form factors that you can carry forward with you. I would recommend an external deck anyway rather than a fancy one of these so you could move it around and use it on your laptop as well. All right, so I'm at $20. What else do you need? Well, I bought RGB RAM and that Secura GPU. I would like to be able to see them and this side panel, you know, don't just leave it off 'cause I have cats. Okay, if you must have a side panel window, Home Depot sells sheets of acrylic and pretty much any size you need. All we got to do is cut it up. More cutting, oh great. And there it is. There's multiple options for cutting acrylic. You can score it and break it, you can use a laser, or probably the best option if you want to keep things simple is to just buy the right size in the first place. So we've got our side panel window, but I'm going to do

you one better okay with nothing but a hole saw, a pair of old panty hose, and a can-do attitude. We can throw some filtered side intakes on this mama jama, feeding fresh air directly to our hungriest components. Cool, let's do it. You got the panty right? No, but I have something else that is not going to work. Yes, it will. That is actually terrible. I'm kind of thinking intake fan here, intake fan here for our GPU, and I don't know. Oh, I thought that's how about another one here. This cutout was going to be for the... I know we're going to put an intake fan on the acrylic, on the acrylic. Yeah, oh, that's not what I had in mind, but okay, can do. Get it together, please don't break the acrylic. This is our one sheet. Well, that's a pretty sheety situation. Get [Applause] cutting. I'm a little worried about doing this on the acrylic, by the way. Are we going to like shatter it to

bits do we want to just not take the risk so that way I can see all my pretty components without shattering it. Okay, that tell Elijah, but I'm pretty concerned about this ripping up the acrylic too. Let's see how this goes. What was that on? Nothing. See, it's working perfectly just like I told you. Cool, I have an idea. Oh my, oh my God. I just need more weight, sir. I just need more weight. Oh yeah, it's so cooked. What do you mean it's cooked? That's plastic like right there. You cracked it all along there. No. Alright, I guess we're only going to find out when we peel the paper off. [Music] Yeah, it looks like a screaming person. That's a vibe. That's this video. Let's see if lus actually did crack it or not. Wow, I for sure thought this thing was destroyed underneath. That is why you fail. It's a movie reference, you wouldn't get it. Oh, okay, what movie? The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, okay, from the Boomer Star.

Wars, you can cut that, you can cut, you can cut, cut, please cut, please cut, please. This window is going to stay on. It's like 9,000 lb of VHB holding strength. That's good. I wanted a side panel window, so you will have one forever. I want the best one, damn it, Elijah. Those lines are really not straight. That's okay. No, it's really not. Well, we can't go back now. No, we really can't. Okay, you know what? From the outside, it's probably, it's actually not that bad. Oh yeah, that's fine. I mean, compared to everything else about this side panel, it really doesn't stand out. Look at that side intakes, front IO, ah, motherboard tray cutout. The only question now is, is our power supply going to fit? Professor Adam, Adam the computer guy. Believe it or not, the width and the height of standard PC power supplies have stayed the same since 1995, and dimensionally, only the length has changed over the years as systems have gotten more power-hungry. Again, there

have been other changes, some of them controversial, but even the mounting hole locations remain unchanged. Now, there is one thing the original spec had: the PSU as close to the CPU as possible. Why? The belief was the fan could pull double duty, pulling air over the passive CPU heat sink and also cooling the PSU before exhausting it completely from the system. But that obviously won't work because processors now weigh like 250 watts. It's freaking stupid. Why would you need that much power? There. That resolves the last major hurdle. But here's the thing: not everyone's going to be building a mid-range system. So why don't we take our case and take it to the next level to see if it can handle a high-end machine? To do this again, I'd probably make sure that there's no little metal filing bits left in here that could fall into the power supply. That could be catastrophic. But I'm not doing it again. I'm doing it now. And inside here is about $3600 worth of modern power-hungry

Hardware including a 16 4 CPU and a 4090 GPU. As you can see, everything fits. Let's game. Before we fire up a game, I think we should test our cooling. It's not the quietest thing in the world, and we appear to have a bit of a problem here. Oh, our temperatures immediately spiked to 81°, and we are using 63% of our power. Also, I couldn't help noticing that one of our fans is actually getting spun backwards. Do you think there's too much back pressure in there? I do. Okay, see, here's the thing though, Elijah. I thought the front panel was staying open. I mean, we can open it. I designed it for maximum intake. There's too much pressure in the computer. Okay, she cannot take it. Open the front panel then. Here we go. Let's see what happens when we do that. They are staying the same. It's not even hot in here. Oh, Liah, that 12-pin power connector is not plugged in all the way. No, it was. I had an issue where

It wasn't plugged in, so I plugged it in more. Look at it. Oh my God, turn it off. Nope, you said turn it off. Oh, the clip is broken. Oh, okay. That man, that's weird 'cause yeah, I opened it up and I was like expecting it to be an inferno down here in the bottom of the case, 'cause that would explain 61% power usage. You know what? None of this even adds up because why was the GPU at 80° then if it was only using 60% power and thermal issues weren't plugged in. Has this GPU been disassembled and reassembled? I don't know. I grabbed it from the shelf. I didn't, I just didn't check. I just grabbed it from inventory. The good news is that on LTT store.com, we can find PTM 7950 thermal pads that we can use to repaste this GPU and get great temperatures. Guess who just volunteered, dude? I nope. I'm just going to go find a different 490 from

inventory nope. I'm GL, really glad my one-day shoot turned into a three-day shoot. My side quest is complete, and as you can see, the 490 is in my hand because I actually had to put a different one in the computer. This is the one that Alex like tore apart for some water cooling and that sh mod where it can draw 1,000 Watts. This cooler cannot cool it, so goodbye this 490 and welcome in the AME 490. We're going to try rerunning firmar and see if we run into the same issues we did before. I'm pretty confident we won't, so let's just hit the 4K one. Let's see what happens happens here. Oh yeah, already our temperature is much, much better than the 80° yesterday, and our power seems to be recording correctly. We're drawing like 440 Watts on the GPU right now. I may be acting surprised that Linus's Jank work did do well, but I'm not as dumb as the character I play on TV. I do know that

buying a new case every single time when you're upgrading your computer is a mistake, especially if you're on a tight budget. But I also know that it's not the worst idea either. If you're already planning on shoving an entire small nation's power consumption worth of parts into your computer, you might not be in a position where you need to pinch pennies on a case. And even if you aren't worried about pinching pennies, it might not be a bad idea to pick up something that's not this. Because if you get a nice case now, you can still carry it forward for future builds, which again will save you the money. Before you do jump the gun on buying a premium case, let's go back to our original $1,000 budget, and we'll show you what we were able to upgrade. You can choose to double the RAM, double the storage, and go from a six-core to an eight-core CPU that is faster. And I could honestly give you an infinite number of systems to use with

the extra 10% of your budget. We gave up our time, but it was worth it in the end because we were able to get a much more powerful system. And while Lonus isn't here to share in our glory of it working, we did have fun along the way. I got to learn how to use some power tools, and you know, maybe touching our tools is actually more fun than, you know, touching grass. Did he script that? He really scripped that. Okay, and it's almost as much fun as our sponsor, Ground News. Their mission is to give you the tools to understand where your news is coming from so you can get as close to the actual facts as possible and then come to your own conclusions. After all, everybody has a bias, like the bias towards thinking you don't have a bias and are way more objective and rational than those other people who are so biased. So Ground News analyzes breaking stories from thousands of sources from across the globe and across the political spectrum, breaking down which stories are being reported by whom for

example check out this story about AI startup perplexity recently being sued for infringement. It got very little coverage from right-leaning outlets. Left-leaning sources emphasize the legal aspects about the story while the center is focusing more on the overall struggle around content usage. Ground news helps you be informed of stories like this that might be missing from your regular news diet with their blind spot feed which shows news stories that are mostly covered by only one side of the political spectrum. When you find something you're interested in, you can add relevant interests to your for-you feed to see more similar news. So start reading the news, not without bias but informed of it, so you can understand what the heck is going on in the world and be potentially the smartest person in it. Go to ground.news/LT or click the link in the description to get 40% off their unlimited access Vantage plan today. If you guys enjoyed this video, let's look back at a $1,000 build that the forum suggested. We asked Reddit R forum and PC part picker and they were

Buying a New Case is a Waste of Money

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

Elijah's new gaming PC case was sourced from a throwaway, saving money for hardware upgrades.

While the old case lacks modern features, its use can lead to significant savings.

The speaker offers tips on finding affordable cases and modifying them, highlighting the importance of size and material for fitting modern hardware.

The ATX standard for motherboards, patented in 1995, has kept the mounting holes and IO locations unchanged, allowing modern boards to fit in old cases.

Ripping off the side panel and using a household fan is a popular trick for cooling in tight spaces.

The pinouts for front panel connectors have also remained the same, while newer cases now offer USB Type-C and additional ports to address modern needs.

The speaker suggests using an external audio deck and offers tips for a side panel window using acrylic sheets.

They propose adding filtered side intakes for fresh air to the components and demonstrate cutting the acrylic for fan placement.

Despite some challenges, the speaker remains optimistic about the DIY process and makes a movie reference to lighten the mood.

Building a High-End PC: Challenges and Solutions

The side panel window installation faced challenges with straight lines, but the final result was acceptable.

The standard dimensions of PC power supplies have remained consistent since 1995, with only the length changing due to increasing power demands.

The high-end hardware installation, worth $3600, fit perfectly, but cooling issues and back pressure in the case led to temperature spikes and fan problems.

The GPU's power usage and temperature were inconsistent, leading to a search for a solution.

A different GPU was sourced from inventory, and after reassembly, it showed improved temperatures and correct power recording.

The narrator discusses the importance of choosing the right case for PC builds and offers upgrade options within a $1,000 budget.

The team sacrificed their time to create a more powerful system, learning to use power tools along the way.

Ground News, the sponsor, offers tools to understand news sources and biases, providing a blind spot feed for underreported stories.

The video also references a $1,000 build suggested by online forums, highlighting the different recommendations from Reddit and PC part picker.