I found myself inspired to start a new Iron Man themed build when I came across this Mini-ITX case from Jonsbo with metallic red accents.
It seemed fitting that the build should have an Arc Reactor – after some searching I found this Mark I Arc Reactor on Ali Express.
It arrived as a kit which took over 3 hours to build! 😩
It turned out great though! I kinda just want to keep it as a desk ornament…
Next step was to purchase some Tungsten Carbide tipped drill bits to make a hole for the arc reactor. Only one chance to get this right!
Minding my own business prepping the case and drilling pilot holes and I manage to cut myself. I guess those new bits are sharp…
Cutt’n and Drill’n. You know what? Loving the look so far. 😍
Now the Arc Reactor is installed in the case let’s look at the hardware we’re using.
Due to the colouring of this build it seemed fitting to pick the red team and go with AMD components:
On the “rebuild” side I had an ITX motherboard and a Ryzen 2400G knocking about, along with a 500gb-ish NVMe SSD. I was going to use an ATX PSU but it would have completely obscured the main components due to its size.
I ended up buying a lot of new and new-ish components for this build. We’ve got a SFX PSU, a low profile RGB CPU cooler, some fast RGB RAM, a Radeon RX 5500 from eBay (someone was upgrading their recent HP Pre-built) and a white LED fan to fit the Iron Man/Arc Reactor vibe.
Timelapse of Assembly:
I wanted the Arc Reactor to be powered internally so I spliced a couple of cables together to power it directly from a USB port on the motherboard.
I combined the barrel jack to USB power cable that came with the Arc Reactor with an internal USB2 header to internal USB3 header adapter cable to create a barrel jack to USB2 internal header adapter cable.
Pretty much done at this point. I acquired some gold thumb screws from China to finish the build and give that final Iron Man touch.
Iron Man PC build complete with Arc Reactor is now finished! I’ll let the visuals do the talking… although feel free to turn the volume up to get the full overly dramatic experience 😅