Sounds like you’re going in a good direction. Again I’ve personally never put anything like this together, I’d be interested to see what you come up with

Yes that was my main concern too. I suppose if you wanted to really go for it, you could also make cutouts for fans and cut some channels for airflow, but in the end aluminum panels with maybe some rubber standoffs for mounting may just be the safer option. And I suppose thubscrews for securing boards would make them easily removable

My mind for mounting personally goes to foam with cutouts (making sure the foam is of an antistatic variety). This would provide a snug fit for different hardware in their assigned spaces, plus easy removal/rearrangment, and in-built shock absorption in case of drops etc. Channels could be cut in the foam to allow different connections and route them where you need.

Now, I can’t say I’ve ever built a project like this so this may not work for your needs.

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I was on a GTX1080 for a long time. Nothing absolutely dealbreaking, but lots of small naggling issues that took lots of annoying troubleshooting to fix. Plus, abysmal DX12 performance (which is a limitation of the cards Pascal architecture as far as I know, not everyone experiences it but it’s common enough).

Switched to an RX 7600XT and wow. Night and day. Zero configuration, zero weird issues, games perform fantastic at high settings (CP2077 at 1440p/High settings across the board is a pretty stable 80+ FPS, compared to 50fps at low and medium and 1080p with the old card, even on Windows). Complete gamechanger.

That’s potentially my biggest issue woth Windows. You aren’t actually made to understand what went wrong. Linux will give you lots of information. It can be overwhelming if you’re just used to seeing “This app stopped working, wait or close it?”, but once you’re used to it, you realize that info usually give you all the tools you need to fix your problem.

To be fair, I’ve had some issues on Windows that have left microsoft support staff saying “yeah man Idk good luck hope you figure that out lol”. Meanwhile, on Arch, I’ve never had a problem that didn’t have a solution, or at least a clearly documented cause (which is almost always just as important as the solution) right there in plain text on the ArchWiki.

Plus, when a windows error happens, you usually just get a little message saying “It dun broke 🤷‍♂️”. Again, on linux, 9 times out of 10, I get a pretty detailed error message at least telling me what broke, and maybe even some hints as to why. I get that Windows has error logs, but I bever have to dig for that info on linux, it’s always presented to me because it’s important.

And then, experience the joy of that program spreading its files to 6 different directories, all at different levels of your drive. Who cares about having a sensical file system that clearly separates system from user?

I was just about to say, yes it can get tiresome to hear the same debates over and over, but it’s kind of what makes FOSS great. We can debate about it and actually have our stances make a difference in the end result of how our systems function.

Yet another item on my list of why I’ll never buy a modern car.