Benchy McBenchface by p0pe in the OBT podcast

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We sat down with Hans Peder aka p0pe to talk about Benchy McBenchface, a mod based on the Open Benchtable. Listen to get exclusive insights and interesting bits about p0pe’s modding journey all the way to the Dreamhack Open CaseMod Championship.

We also set up a full transcript of the Interview for those of you that like to read.

OBT Podcast #1 – Benchy McBenchFace by p0pe

A very good looking PC has everything to catch your eyes, and when it’s built with a powerful system : it gets me excited ! I got sit down with Hans Peder also known as p0pe, the highly respected case modder from Denmark.

Hans Peder has been modding PC for more than a decade and he recently won the DREAMHACK CASE MOD CHAMPIONSHIP 2017 with Benchy McBenchFace, a mod based on the Open Benchtable.

Today I chat to Hans Peder about how he gets to create some of the best looking PC in the world.

We talk about his story in the modding scene. How he turns a piece of acrylic into a fully-featured distribution plate. How he overcomes challenges with new builds…

My Name is Isaïe aka Trouffman from the Open Benchtable Project, and this is the OBT-Podcast.

———– Intro Music sequence ———–

Thank you Hans Peder for joining us in this podcast and share your story.

Let’s start with a little bit of yourself and the journey toward your modding hobby. how did that happen?

Well, it’s long story. I think it started about eleven years ago. I got my first PC with some really old components and decided that I didn’t really like the outside look off the case so a tour of one of the side panels and just went to town with it with a with a drill and a hammer and some mesh that i cut out from an old and trash can. I put on some eighty millimeters LED fans… in orange. And that was basically how I started and from there on everything just escalated.

We are here now, you are a well-respected face in the modding industry. Would you consider that as a full time job or just something you learn and do on the side?

It was only something that i was doing on the side when I started : I was in what you guys probably call “elementary school”. Then when I got to high school I started out doing a bit more advanced stuff with them [modding project, ed.]. I really get myself into CAD drawings and liked drawing things up in 3D and trying to get the machine laser cutting and stuff. So from high school and then on to university, I really taught myself like, a lot of different ways to thought of and manufacture them [mod pieces, ed.].

So, you do manufacture all your stuff by yourself, like you have a CNC and Laser engraving access.

I started up by doing it. We had a CNC and a laser cutter at my university. From there I learned how to program the CNC to do the code for it, put the material, etc. Basically i did everything myself back then, but back then in times where i don’t have access to it CNC machine, i have friends who work at machine shops that can lend me some or do the actual machining myself [themselves, ed.].

That’s cool, so you do all the CAD drawing for everything, and then you can send that for production

yeah, exactly. But for everything i have this philosophy : “everything that i can do myself in the case mod what i will do myself”.

Let’s focus on your mod based on the Open Benchtable because that’s what this is podcast is all about. What is the creative process you follow to do that kind of mod ?

Well, it all of my mods starts up with basically one component. Some of them starts out with a motherboard that i want to do some built around other mods starts out with a water cooling system.

For this one, i just fell in love with the with the design of the Open Benchtable. I’m a huge sucker for well designed CNC machined or just generally well-fabricated parts. So it was something i knew i needed to get my hands on.

I got you guys to actually send me one just to see if it was something I wanted to try to build in.

In the beginning i just wanted to do a simple build with some sleeving and a simple watercooling system. But as my case mods tends to do from time to time everything just escalated… and here i am…

It became rather quickly complex…

Yes, exactly! because i’m not very good at restraining myself.

When i first got into this kind of things, the ideas just start rolling, so i tried it out. I just decided that i wanted to do something huge with them, with distro plates [watercooling distribution plate, ed.] and water cooling and a lot of cabling while still keeping it as an actual benchtable. I didn’t want it to go too far away from the original design idea.

Is this the reason why this mod is all open and accessible ?

Yes exactly!

I wanted to also [try it, ed.] because one of the challenges of doing a build like this is that there’s no shroud to hide stuff behind. You can’t just take all of your ugly wires and put them behind a motherboard tray and say : “look what i built”. Doing this actual build where everything can be seen even if you look under the motherboard. So so there’s no places to hide anything

That was the biggest challenge for putting up that mod?

Yeah. Like i always try not to just shovel everything into a compartiment on the rear side of a case. For example, half of the case is good looking and the other half it’s, like an ugly bird’s nest. For this one is was especially challenging because, there is nothing that it’s not visible all of the time. Like if you look at it from the front and you just look like a tiny bit down, you’ll see the PSU and if you look a bit up, you’ll see the rest of the components. So it’s just that open.

You cannot mess up on the wiring of that !

No, no, no, I had a few wires that, i think, where five millimeters too long, so I ended up just tearing them out and just redoing it. They just look silly when installed. It was very unforgiven to try and make it look good. [ed.] actually develop, what’s called, then she back, bench face.

The outcome is pretty impressive, good job on that!

Thank you

The mod is called Benchy McBenchface, where does this name come from?

Normally when i do a case mod, i try to find out, some super serious name that flies really well with the progress on the actual mod.

For this one, i don’t know, i guess i just got tired of trying to be super serious about it all the time. So i remembered back to when the internet was supposed to do a vote on what an arctic exploration boat was going to be called, that was going to be called Boaty McBoatFace. So i basically just got the inspiration from there, and i thought the Benchy McBenchface was kind of catchy.

It is catchy indeed! That’s very nice to hear the story behind it, actually… I love it.

You talk about the distribution plate for the watercooling, the one you made for Benchy McBenchface, that’s one of the biggest distro-plate I’ve seen outside of a case. You are accommodating the CPU, the VGA, you have dual pumps, you even have quick release just underneath.

I wonder how you managed to put all that in the same complex setup.

Yes, it was a nightmare! The entire plate is… it’s a bit hard to explain… but normally when you make distribution plate you will just have two flat plates that are screwed together.

For this one i needed to have one plate that was ten millimeters in one side and then eighteen millimeters in the other side to fit the pumps in. It had to have two levels. To design, to machine that and to to polish it up was just a super nightmare.

You can see it : If you look in the front of the casemod, you can see where the pumps are. Right behind those, the acrylic plate it’s attached to, it gets thinner. There’s a kind of an off a recess there.

They’re just so massive! Both plates has been milled out from solid twenty five millimeter acrylic blocks. So much material has been taken off.

You posted pictures on your facebook page. It’s impressive what you can do with a block of RAW material and end-up with this glass-looking result. How many times did you had to polish it to get this look ?

Polishing is super [sssuuupppeeerrr, ed.] time consuming and it’s also why you’ll see that a lot of the guys who does these plates end up not polishing them. Because it just takes so much time.

For this one i had to first, for each of the blocks, to sand down starting from grain 400 then moving on to 800, 1000, 1500, 2000 and 2500. Both of the huge acrylic pieces had to be sanded with that, which probably took like ten hours or something. It is stupid amount of hours!

After the sanding I would polish it first with a rough polisher and then a medium polisher and then a finisher. The entire polishing process was it just took so much time.

There are so much special bezels and corners and things that must have been difficult to get perfect.

Yes, exactly. There is so many chamfers on these edges all around so it’s not just a square piece of acrylic there is tiny details all over the place.

The result is, for sure, impressive.

Did that happen to you that you broke a distribution plate in the past while polishing it and you had to start all over again?

No, not while polishing. While machining, yes, stuff broke. One of the main acrylic plates for this one actually did break while machining it. So i had to redo that one, which was a bummer because material like that is actually rather expensive. But, yeah, such is life. You you learn from your mistakes.

There was some comment online about the mod regarding cooling operations on reddit. With the distro plate connected to the CPU and the Graphic Cards but there is no radiators nor reservoir.

That is one of the super funny things about this build. It is also the kind of stuff that i get a lot of questions about :

There’s no radiator
There is no Reservoirs.

The radiators is a funny story because i kinda wanted this built without radiators. I can actually also run it [this build, ed.] without a reservoir.

On the side of the build there are two quick disconnect fittings. The main idea when building this was that those quick disconnect fittings would go to a radiator station that i have here at home.

It’s not very pretty but it’s super functional. That thing it would cool the entire build.

When i went to Dreamhack I forgot a radiator. I was supposed to bring a radiator so that the build could be running a game up-there but i only remembered to bring the reservoir. While setting it up, i was like frantically looking around asking people if they had a spare radiator but no one had any. So i thought “ok i have to ASUS 1080Ti Poseidon Graphic Cards on here.

These are hybrid cards which means they have a water block and they have fans on them. My theory was that if i just disabled SLI so i only ran the system with one graphic card maybe these two Graphic Cards could act as radiators and dissipate all off the heat.

And it worked ! The fluid never got above 40*C while playing Battlefield 1, and that is, with a 16 core Threadripper CPU and 1080Ti just smashing out heat.

That’s crazy.

Yeah, so so these two graphic cards actually managed to keep the entire system cold for an entire week while, playing Battlefield 1 on it like, sixteen hours a day.

That is definitely an interesting way to look at it!

You went on to that extend because you had to run games on the rig to participate in the modding competition ?

It was because i had to have it at the at ASUS booth to be on display there. We hooked it up to to a 34 inch ultra wide monitor for people to play games (Battlefield 1) on there.

One of the rules and the competition is that you have to have a functioning PC. In other competitions around the world you’ll see guys just putting a motherboard into, you know, a huge metal bucket, and then say that that is a working motherboard. But for Dreamhack you actually have to have a functioning PC for it to be accepted.

But that was the second story of it as I have to have it on display at the at the ASUS booth. I wanted to really show that this is not just something that is here for fun, and it can actually work. And it’s going to be my main main daily driver.

As it is you daily PC, you have a double 1080Ti and Threadripper. I guess you use the extra radiator and extra reservoir as well ?

Right now, they’re actually just sitting loose because i’m in the middle of moving. Also I’m in the middle of building another external radiator in the same design as the distro plate that is on the bench here.

Interesting! We are looking forward to see the result for that.

Speaking of the distro plate again, you used some special joint, was that made custom or you have a few tricks up your sleeve to ensure it is tight sealed.

The o’ring is a funny thing. Most of the stuff people ask is about the o’ring : “How to join it together?”, “How to make sure it does not leak?”, “Which o-ring to use?”…

There’s two ways of going about this : You can either take some o’ring string and then cut it and glue it together. Or you get o’ring in specific length, which is what I do because it’s a bit safer and there is there’s absolutely no chance of it leaking. You don’t have trace of glued seal somewhere [on the distroplate, ed.].

What i do is that i start out by designing my parts and then i check if everything fits. When i’m in the final stages of the design i check if i can o’rings in those actual length. If i cannot i will adjust the designed to accommodate so that it fits the available sizes online.

So that is though off right from the design phase.

Yeah exactly. I test out like i do with the general CAD design of the o’ring channels to make it so that it it looks like i want to have it looking. Then i test if there’s anything that fits this. normally it’s only within a few millimeters that i have to correct it.

Very nice! In term of pressure testing, I saw on one of your facebook update that you add a pressure gauge thing to test for leaks or is it for the rigidity of the distro?

Both actually. When you do a distro-plate like this it’s very cumbersome to put fluid in it, figure out there’s a leak, having to take everything apart.

What i do is that i just test with air instead. If there’s a leak then i don’t have to clean up the huge mess that is fluid all over.

I test by pressurizing into it and i think my pre-test goes up to half a bar [above atmospheric pressure, ed.]. If anything is going to break or if anything’s going to leak it’s going to be doing it at that point.

I don’t have to worry about flowing going like all over the place and i’m also completely sure that this thing will last a lifetime because no water cooling system is going to get to that kind of pressure.

Do you leave that overnight and then check the variation ?

Yeah there’s a there’s a pressure gauge and on there so i can see if it drops in pressure overnight.

That’s a very good way to not mess up your hardware and make sure everything work well.

Yes and it actually blows my mind that fewer people are using these. It’s such a clever way to avoid seeing if you have forgotten to screw in a plug somewhere. And the moment you start testing with fluid, you’re basically just betting your entire life earning or saving that you just put into your pc that you didn’t mess up…

And there’s no insurance for “oops I forgot to test”!

No, exactly! At least you have to have a very good insurance for that.

Not sure it would last long.

Let’s talk about cable management, I remember back when you worked on this Benchy McBenchface you posted an update talking about “Training your cables”, with special cable combs. How is this important for the final result ?

These cables are made for theses components. Cable management is is one of my big love, or how you would say it : “I really enjoyed doing my own cables, making them completely custom to length, so that they’re just-in there and looking great.”

That also come with a downside, that you have to spend an absurd amount of time on it. I designed the cable combs so that there was a bit off guidance for the cables. Also, because if they’re just lose and when transporting it, when it’s all open, they will just flip all around the place.

How do you plan doing your cables as the cable combs are not removable ?

The way i do my cables is that i finish the end that goes into the components. First, for example, the end that goes into the graphic cards and then i just make the cables ten centimeters longer than i’ve measured them out to be. I route them all the way around into the power supply, and then i cut them off to link in the actual power supply. This way they get the exact length that they need to be going from the components and down. Once i’ve done the cable management, there is no easy way to just take out the cables off the off.

That mean this build has to stay like this for a long time.

Yes, for example, with this one, the connector on the a Asus cards is flipped compared to normal graphic cards. So if i wanted to take out theses graphics cards and put in a 1080ti Founders Edition… the cables would no longer fit.

That is one of the downsides of doing it this way because it doesn’t get particularly modular. For example, with that motherboard as well, the 8 PIN EPS connector is in a really weird location. If i were to plug another motherboard into this system, i probably have to redo a lot of the cables.

Damn ! Let’s say that your system with Threadripper and the dual 1080Ti is good for quite some time.

yeah, that should last me at least another couple of months. The silly thing is that the only game that i play at the moment is PUBG and that doesn’t utilize SLI at all.So so one of the graphic arts is basically just there to look good.

Saying that you will make enemies with the prices of graphic cards recently. As you mentioned earlier you can always use the second card as a radiator.

I’m actually right now i only have a two 80 millimeter radiator that hook up to the entire thing. And it’s surprisingly cool for such a low amount of radiator space.

I remember you had to cut out your M.2 heat spreader as well to make it fit in the build.

Oh, yes, that was a there was a strange little operation because i wanted to put two of the EK heat things on the M.2 drives because I know that they get quite hot. When i put those on and i put it on the riser card for the motherboard, i was hitting some small components on the riser card.

I had to take, like one of my saw and then cut off a chunk of the heatsink and miraculously it still works. On one of the M.2 drive there is one of the temperature sensors that it’s constantly registering eighty four degrees, even though it has just been plugged-in. So i think that i broke something. Other than that, they work perfectly.

With this mod Benchy McBenchface you won the Dreamhack Case Mod Championship at Dreamhack Winter in 2017.

How was the journey towards the convention, was that something you intend to do and participate or you entered the competition last minute ?

I had thought to join DreamHack, but i was not sure that i was going to be making it or able to make it. In the last week up until DreamHack, i assembled the distro-plate, I made all of the cables and did all of the final assembly of the built. So i did not sleep for four days, and then i slept all the way up there in the car, while my buddy drove there. So it was tight, but but i made it .

You entered the competition with a rather unique take on the approach. How was the competition spirit with the other contestant ?

The competition in the Dreamhack is always really tough. There’s a lot of swedish guys there. I don’t know why, but compared to the danish modding scene, the swedish [modding, ed.] scene is just so much bigger. There is so many more skilled guys up there.

I actually did not really post anything, any pictures with the distro-plate. I just posted the final pictures of all the sleeving and the components on the actual test bench in hopes of tricking the guys up there to think that it was all that i brought.

Then you show up at the competition displaying the complete mod with the full distro plate out of the blue.

[chuckles]

I like to believe that it took them by surprise. They’ve only seen the pictures with the cables in place. In my mind they saw it [the pictures, ed.] and they thought, hey, we can easily beat that. And then they put on the main part.

Along your career as a modder is that the first time you play with a full open-air system ?

I haven’t really seen that many open air system. I think that the ones I’ve seen has been recently with inwin when making their new cases. A lot of them are open air.

Having an open air case is, what you call it, a gamble. Especially at events because people can just go in there and just take your ram’s out.

I had one guy at a Dreamhack who went up to the case and just put his finger on the ram block and just started wiggling it back and forth until the system rebooted.

He just shrug his shoulders then he walked off… I thought “what are you doing?”.

I think that a lot of people are [like that, ed.] also because it’s untraditional. I think that’s the reason why we don’t see a lot of these kind of builds as well.

You were nominated as well for the Bit Tech Mod of the Year in 2017, another well recognized modding contest in Europe.

Do you usually submit all your mods to competitions?

No. There’s a bunch of case mods that i actually never even got to post pictures. Sometimes you’re just so busy building these things, that the whole documenting and taking pictures could be too time consuming. It’s the same thing with joining all the case modding competitions. Because, for most of them, you have to have a large work log. Most of the other ones you have to write in and nominate yourself and fill out a huge questionnaire. I did that like a few years back, but right now i simply do not have the time for it.

You recently got the OpenBenchtable Mini version as well, maybe there will be something coming as well.

Maybe, Yeah! I’m in the planning stages for it. My planning stages normally take, half a year, if not more. So don’t expect anything soon.

So other modders you are warned, you still have a good 6 month before the Mini is modded by p0pe. We still don’t know what it will look like at this point.

Yes that’s how I normally do sponsorships and build. I write to people and say “I have an idea, it’s going to be insane. I need these parts. Are you interested ?” “Yes we are interested, can you show us some renders ?” “No I can’t show you render because I havent started designing it yet, I just have the idea.”

Fantastic. This has been an interesting discussion with you, p0pe. Thank you for your time and sharing your story about Benchy McBenchface. We hope to talk to you again soon.

You’re welcome, thank you for your time.

This was an exclusive discussion with Hans Peder Stahl, better known as p0pe, about his mod Benchy McBenchface based on the Open Benchtable.

Don’t forget to check out the website openbenchtable.com for more content and to get your Open Benchtable & Open Benchtable Mini today, available in silver, black and red.

Editor’s note:

Big thank you to Elsa M. for the help on the transcription!

Thanks to Timothée P. (Xyala) for the extra audio recording.

Thanks to OverClocking-TV for the edit & hosting of the video.

Let us know what you think of the podcast and your questions about modding on the OBT family.