Towards the beginning of my start as mitxlove, I recall running into an amazing custom-built mini ITX case, the case was a white cube with neon green accents. It was beautifully pictured and looked extremely elegant yet powerful. Later I would find out that the that build would be named “C.ACE”. I remember thinking “My God the crazy cool things that people come up with”. Never would I have imagined that a few short months later I would be in contact with the creator of that beast PC himself, Johan Nyman!

Johan has been modding for a few years, and runs a modders blog site called Minimalistic PC where he showcases his and his friend’s projects! You can check out his page HERE

As an experienced modder with plenty of amazing work to show, I thought that Johan would make an excellent choice to be the first to be featured on my showcase blog! Below you will find a short interview showing us details about Johan, as well as a small gallery of a few of his past projects! Johan and Minimalistic PC have an Instagram page –@minimalisticpc -along with their website, after checking out this showcase, make sure to check them out! In the meantime, enjoy!

Johan Nymen
Minimalistic PC

1. Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from, how old are you, what do you do for a living, etc.
-“My name is Johan Nyman, I am 23 years old from Sweden. I started modding PCs and building my cases from scratch around 2007. All my different modding projects finally landed me a job in the industry which I am very happy about.”

 2. How and when did you become a PC enthusiast? How did you turn into a PC modder? (Give us a short description of your PC history)
-“When my father bought a new PC I always got the old one and from there I was hooked, but I was not like most of the other kids that played games on it, I liked taking it apart and trying to figure out how it worked, what parts did what and so on. When I got older I started with overclocking and that lead into heat problems, so I started cutting out holes in my case to add more fans and so on. Later I found different modding forums online and from then I was hooked.”

 3. What is your favorite build that you’ve worked on and why?
-“My favorite build that I made myself is probably CURV3D which is my smallest build, I really like the curved shape of the case.”

 4. Most if not all of your modded builds are SFF, why is it that you favor SFF builds?
-“Well I have never really had much money, so my builds have mostly been on a tight budget. At the same time I have never really been a big gamer so I never needed two graphics cards etc, so why build a big computer? For me modding has never been about hardware but about the building and modding and with SFF-hardware I think it is easier to build cases with different shapes from regular cases on the market.”

 5. If you could give advice to anyone considering getting into modding PC’s what would you say to them?
-“I see a lot of comments from people who sees a nice mod and they say “Wow I wish I could do something like that!”. Well it is not always that difficult, changing some small details on a case could make a big difference.

So my advice for a newcomer is to get a cheap case and try to improve it and make it look better with small steps.”

 6. If you could give advice to anyone considering making the change to SFF PC’s what would you say to help them decide?
-“To think about what hardware they really need, do you really need triple-sli or is it just to brag on Facebook? Because with SFF now you can really build a very powerful PC, something I think I did myself with my build C.ACE which uses a i5 6600K and a AMD R9 Nano.”

 7. Is there any other builder/modder that you admire? Who and why?
-“There is two, a Swedish friend/modder called Laine which does very awesome projects, both case-mods and scratch-builds.

The other modder is Attila which as well has done so cool projects with simple hand tools.”

8. Can you tell us a little about any current or future projects coming up?
-“I’m working on two projects right now, first of all I want to do a custom watercooled build in my old project CURV3D so I can have a very powerful HTPC.

 I also have a project called SAIL which is another scratch-build with a mini-ITX motherboard, a Pentium G3258 and a GTX 750ti all powered by a Pico-PSU.”

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 F4DE

“I have always focused on building my cases from scratch, but when I found Cubitek’s Mini Cube, I wanted to try out to do a regular case mod. I modified the case to fit a 240mm radiator and made a custom-loop with chromed copper tubing which fits the black-chrome theme of the mod.”

 CASE: Cubitek Mini Cube
MOBO: MSI Z87I
CPU: Intel I5 4670K
GPU: GTX 460
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum 2x4gb
SSD: Samsung 840 120gb
PSU: Be-Quiet! Dark Power Pro P10 550W
Watercooling: EKWB

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Cold Winter

“Cold Winter was my second project which I started while finishing up The Red One, I actually used spareparts from my recent project to build Cold Winter. It all started with a piece of bent acrylic which I cut out to a shape I liked and then used that as a base for the project.”

 MOBO: Gigabyte GA-F2A88XN-WIFI
CPU: AMD A10-7850K
RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum 2x4gb @ 2133MHz
SSD: Samsung 840 120gb
PSU: Be-Quiet 300W SFX
Watercooling: EKWB

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CURV3D

“CURV3D is the project of mine that I like the most, it is also the project that have been the most popular on forums and social media. I actually have won several modding competitions with this small build.”

 MOBO: Asus E45M1-I Deluxe
RAM: 2x4GB Corsair DD3
SSD1: Corsair Force 60GB
SSD2: Intel X-25-V G2 40GB
HDD: Samsung Spinpoint 1TB

 

Hector
mitxlove