External Graphics Card, box begining
A while back I needed to upgrade my graphics card for my desktop computer. My desktop isn't anything fancy, just a couple year old Emachine. It works fine for what I use it for, but I needed a newer graphics card with HDMI out.
The bad thing about this Emachine, while it does have a couple open slots inside, there's basically no room in the small case to actually put even a small sized PCI or PCI-E card in there.
So what I ended up doing was buying a
PCI-E extender, and ran that out the side of the desktop and connected the Graphics card on the outside. And I've been running the graphics card on the outside of the case for a couple months now.
A while ago I designed an external case for the card in Tinkercad, and finally tried printing it today. When I loaded up the model of the external case on the printer, it fit on the printbed (just barely in one direction) but when the printer "ripped" it, it reported it was going to take 5 and a half hours to print.
That's the thing about 3D printing, it's not really fast.
Rather than take all that time printing the whole box, I sliced the front plate of the box off instead. That's really the most custom part anyway. And I printed that instead. It took only 36 minutes to print just the front facing. And I'm glad that's the only part I printed because when I tried it, my measurements were off in a couple places.
I adjusted the pieces that weren't sized correctly in Tinkercad and reprinted just that front plate again. The 2nd try worked a lot better, and 4 minutes faster, since I needed to make the slot larger and therefore use less material on the second go around.
I'll likely create the other 5 sides of the box, which are pretty straightforward rectangles of plastic, with more traditional tools in the coming weeks as time allows.