After a few years of glorious service my motherboard conked out - the chipset was running extremely hot just seconds after power on, didn't fancy delidding it - and I reflect on the general good luck I've had with computers and components that almost none of them have had issues, at least not once they've been built.
Compatible motherboards seemed very thin on the ground so it seemed like a good time for an upgrade. To replace the i5 7600, step in the i5 10500, accompanied by the ASRock H470M-itx.
There are a couple of other changes I've made to my original design, namely storage, but the time was right to look at my case upgrade path. I've had my eye on the Streacom DB4 - also passively-cooled - for a while, and as luck would have it, when I went onto eBay, there was one for sale with most of a GPU cooling kit with it, in good condition, an hours drive from me, at a good price, with no-one else bidding. A late bidder pushed me up to my actual maximum bid, £161, street value over £300.
My previous case, the Streacom FC8, has an IR receiver by Flirc built in that hooks up to the motherboard and I kinda got really used to that convenience, pairing it with my soundbar remote to allow perfect HTPC functionality as I can control everything I need there. The DB4 doesn't have either the chip or the shield but there's no particular reason I couldn't just do the same with it so I just have the chip dangling out of the front. It picks up the IR signal perfectly and is quite small and doesn't look out of place or spoil the looks at all (imo).
The optical drive doesn't seem to be working anymore. I suppose that's bad luck. Never used it much, and to adapt the DB4 to it restricts options and needs a special kit. So am without it. If you have a DVD that you're desperate for me to watch, well, there's no longer any optical drives in the house so you'll have to bring your own round.
This is my second passive-cooling build, everything's a little less daunting once you know what you're doing, and the build was pleasant and easy. Thermals are good, I can get the CPU to 85C under load but is staying around 30C (room temp 20) under light loads. The case is spacious, intuitive, and very well-machined.
In terms of the other components, well, I have no complaints nor comments, really, they're all doing their jobs, which are limited to staying stable and happy and playing back 4k content, for which it's overkill.
Case: Streacom DB4
CPU: i5-10500
Motherboard: Asrock H470M-itx
RAM: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-2133 CL14
Storage: Barracuda 510 1TB M.2 NVME, 2xBarracuda (5+4TB) HDD
PSU: PicoPSU 160
Having sold my PS4 recently I've got a new gaming PC arriving in an NCase M1 so there's every chance I do some swaps and come out with a 'best of both worlds' build or something. Check this space!
Pics available here