In this episode, I tried to do something that sounded way better in my head: build a decent-looking desktop case for a 1U HP ProLiant SE316M1 using the cheapest wood I could find at Home Depot. Spoiler: they were fence posts, they were damp, and my woodworking skills are… not exactly winning awards. The end result is a big, rough wooden box that honestly looks more like a server coffin than a clean PC case—and it’s hilariously impractical at about 35 inches long and 19 inches wide. As a proof of concept though, it shows you can adapt a rackmount server to a “desktop-ish” form factor if you’re willing to fabricate. After putting it together, I ran into a major mistake: I didn’t let the wood dry long enough, so it shrunk and warped. That meant the server wouldn’t fit with the sound dampening pads installed, and even enclosed it’s still loud—because 1U servers are just loud. I also collected temperature data by running Prime95 small FFTs for 10 minutes with the case open and closed, and then I ran some benchmarks (stress-ng plus a couple system/GPU benchmarks). Along the way I finally got the included 10K SAS drive working after properly configuring the RAID card, and Ubuntu’s drive profiling showed about 71.8 MB/s average read with 7.69 ms access time. In the end, I’m probably rethinking the design (a 4U would make way more sense), and I’m planning to auction this off locally and donate proceeds to open-source projects.