By Justin Zhang in 3d models — 28 Dec 2025

Acrylic + Steel 847Plus Motherboard Case

847Plus motherboard unboxing and 3d model files for a custom case I made for it.

Context

I got my hand on one of these 847 Plus mini motherboards this summer on Chinese second hand trading platform Goofish, for around ~25 Canadian dollars, including all core components (bought separately) namely a stick of 8G DDR3 laptop memory, 64GB of mSATA SSD, one Intel Core i5-3230M 2C4T lower mobile platform CPU. Most notably, this configuration out performs Raspberry Pi 5 (currently sells at 200+ CAD) by a wide margin.

Much like J1900 星际蜗牛 / B75 K9-ETH boards, this motherboard had a small form factor (no larger than a 4080 motherboard) and was created to perform in crypto mining farms. This board was likely retired from one of those farms after the crypto crash and wide adoption of ASIC miners. Not like the other motherboards though, this board features a rPGA988B (Socket G2) CPU connector so we can swap out the Pentium CPU that came with it.

As of physical connectors, it has 2 USB 2.0 ports, 1 USB 2.0 internal header, 1 EJ45 100Mpbs ethernet port, 1 VGA connector, 1 SATA 2.0 port. It is powered by a PCIE 6 pin power socket, commonly used to power graphics cards.

One notable feature is the male PCIE connector on the board, making it look like a graphics card. This design is similar to male PCIE connectors found on Intel NUC boards and was meant to pair with a PCIE extension board which splits it into multiple x1 signals. If you attempt to plug this into a motherboard's female connector, best case scenario it will not work.

I bought this board for two main reasons. First of all although my motherboard (Tyan-S8030) has onboard BMC, there's no way to access it remotely once the machine is down. I want to run tailscale on this board so I can access BMC and ipmi remotely. Secondly, I need a Proxmox backup server on a separate hardware, and 8GB RAM is just enough for the purpose.

3D Model + DXF Files

While I'm aware of various cases and designs around this board online, many of them are either not worth it (>40% of cost for my entire setup), or only has a obj file. Therefore I want to make my own case so if I need to mount it somewhere else or drill a hole and mount something on it, it would be more convenient.

I originally planned to build the whole case out of acrylic glass, but there's not enough scrap acrylic to support the build. I end up sacrificing some scrap stainless steel sheet lying around, and lasered them just like I would with the acrylic panes.

I prototyped with cardboard at first, then cut and assembled them together. For the PLA pillars I used a thread tap to drill out threaded M3 screw holes. If you want to replicate the project and don't have one by your hand, you should offset the hole wall by 1-2 mm.

I've uploaded the 3D models, DXF files ready to feed into a laser cutter (1 point = 1 mm), and the original Fusion 360 export f3d files in the link above, under CC-BY-SA license. Give it a try if you have time.