For many years now I've been using the first computer I had ever built (Old Blue) as a home server supporting HTTP, FTP, SSH, RDP, SMD, PHP and a few other protocols running on Centos 8. Though it was nearly 20 years old it did the job fine. After building my self a new desktop I came across the Cooler Master Masterframe 700.

The case was very unique looking and best of all you could wall mount it. After having Old Blue under my desk for a number of years the idea of wall mounted server was very appealing. So, I gathered the following components and began building my new server, NeoBlue.

NeoBlue Components

• Cooler Master MasterFrame 700
• AMD Ryzen 7 3rd Gen - RYZEN 7 3800X CPU
• G.SKILL Trident Z Royal Series 16GB (x2) RAM
• ASRock B550 TAICHI AM4 AMD B550 Motherboard
• SAMSUNG 980 M.2 2280 1TB
• Seagate IronWolf Pro 8TB NAS Hard Drive 7200 RPM
• EVGA 750 B5 Gold PSU
• Sapphire Radeon R7 370 GPU
• Soft Hard RGB PSU Cable Extension
• VIVO Full Motion Wall Mount

The MasterFrame is a pretty heavy case made of thick steel but offers plenty of room to route your cables. The wall mounting was a bit tricky. My initial arm had a swivel head and when wall mounting you have to place the PSU on the left wing resulting in a full tilt to the side. Another hurdle was my first motherboard being dead on arrival causing me to have to take apart the whole computer and wait on a new one. ASRock was actually very easy to deal with and I was able to get a new board in a week. I ended up getting the PSU cable extension to make the cable long enough to run through the back also, the extnsion has cool led lights which makes it 10% faster. For NeoBlue I decided to give Ubuntu Server 22 LTS a try.

If you're wondering what happened to Old Blue well, I took out the motherboard and and replaced it with a ASRock Z97 I had laying around, put in an i7, and 16GB of RAM. I then gifted it to my nephew however, FedEx did not treat the package as delicate and broke the case and several components. Luckily, a month later my dad came to visit and brought the busted computer back and I was able to replace the drives and get it working again, all be it with a now broken case. I'm still in the process of getting my insurance claim back from FedEx (sigh...). But hey, isn't this a cool looking computer?!