The Stout Owl: How I Built the Ultimate Noctua G2 PC
Illumination, and The Case of the 12V Power Button
For the illumination (I refuse to call it RGB, as you may have noticed) I used Phanteks’ Neon M1 and M5 strips, as I liked their diffuser, along with a Phanteks NexLinq V2 hub. This hub would display the correct color from the moment it receives power, which is of the utmost importance, because for some reason, even in 2025, Asus still thinks we all want to see unicorn vomit in the time between pressing the power button and typing in our password.
The only acceptable illumination colors in this build are anything between white, warm white, and amber. Anything else may as well be criminal, and I can’t be seen displaying the default strafing rainbow next to Noctua’s classy colors, even for a few seconds.
Sadly, the NexLinq hub doesn’t allow custom color nor brightness control yet, so I’m relying on Windows Dynamic Lighting to get the exact shade and brightness I’m looking for. Thankfully, the hub does default to ‘Off’ during bootup, or whatever it last remembered, depending on the mood it’s in, which is acceptable.
During installation, however, I found that one of the LED strips was broken. I tried soldering it, but ran out of tin. It was still early in the evening, but it was a Sunday, so the shops were closed, and I couldn’t obtain more. Moreover, this strip had to go in before I could move on with any other part of the build. I had hit a roadblock until dawn.
“A tragic development. How could this possibly have happened?! Everything in this project has been going entirely according to plan!” I sarcastically chanted to myself all night.
The final configuration is for the hub to drive the downward facing LED strip at full brightness in a rich amber color, which is only really visible at night – hence what’s essentially really warm white, and Windows Dynamic Lighting takes over the forward and sideways facing strips at 10% brightness for a subtle lighting accent to complement the power button, but doesn’t distract from the rest of the system or blind the user.
Speaking of the power button – this is the coolest button $6 has ever bought me. It has a clicking quality that even the best mechanical switches cannot think to compete with (you’ll have to watch the video for a demonstration). Obviously, it has an amber LED ring around it, a stainless-steel body, and it’s a 12V button.
Buying the 12V version was intentional. I could have purchased a 5V variant that I could power by the power button headers on the motherboard; however, I also bought a 12V Bosch 5-pin relay along with the button. Why? So that when the system is powered, the power LED receives 12V for full brightness, and when in sleep mode, the relay switches to the 5V power button LED output from the motherboard, so that it blinks at a lower brightness.
ATX power supplies have a common ground, so this works without a problem – I’ve done this in the past and double-checked with a multi-meter. Except, there was a problem: It turns out that this specific motherboard does not make the power button blink in sleep mode. Therefore, the entire relay circuit was redundant. So, I just connected the button up to 12V power from the PSU instead and called it a day.
What I did not see coming, though, is that the 12V rail doesn’t instantly lose power the moment the system enters sleep mode or is shut down. Instead, the power button now gradually dims over the course of a few seconds, while the fans also lose their momentum. While it was entirely unintentional, it’s also very cool.
The power button has become, in effect, a representation of the (residual) voltage on the 12V rail of the PSU. Now that’s what a power LED is supposed to act like, if you ask me. This must be one of those ‘happy accidents’ Bob Ross told us about. After the LED strip catastrophe, and what will go down in history as The Great Sunday Evening Tin Shortage, seeing the power button’s LED behave this way gave me motivation to see this build through to the end.
After many iterations and attempts to get everything working, I installed the fans in the top panel. With Noctua’s own components complementing the case I had so meticulously built, and everything working well, I knew that I was onto a pretty special-looking build.
Motherboard installation
With the top panel finally sorted, I moved on to the motherboard installation. For this, I chucked the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K into the Asus Z890-Creator, and clicked the four 24 GB DDR5-7200 modules from Team-Group into place. I also installed the two SSDs: a 2 TB Kingston Renegade G5 into the primary PCIe 5.0 capable M.2 slot as the main system drive, and a 2 TB Team-Group Classic C47 SSD into a PCIe 4.0 slot.
I also pre-installed the bracket for the Noctua NH-D15 G2 CPU cooler. The beast wouldn’t be getting installed until way later, when all the cable management was done, but as the case’s spine doesn’t have a cutout to access the back of the motherboard, I made sure the bracket was already in place for later.
Then, I installed the motherboard, and boy was I glad that I pre-installed the cooler’s bracket – getting the thumbscrews turned in, as pretty as they are, was a very difficult task. The spots I drilled out for the threaded inserts were quite accurate, but the M4 thumbscrews only just fit through the motherboard’s nine holes. Consequently, being off by only half a millimeter meant a lot of extra turning resistance – resistance I had to overcome without the aid of a screwdriver. My fingers hurt after this. I prayed to not have to remove the motherboard later.
Power Supply installation
Moving on, it was time to tackle the PSU chamber. I had already installed all the power cables, along with the custom extensions I had made into the system’s spine, albeit not in any tidy manner. I tucked the cables through the cutout in the PSU chamber, and then bolted the chamber into place.
For the power supply, because the entire system up until this point used 100% G2 fans, I decided that the G1 fan installed in the Seasonic x Noctua 1600W Prime PSU was not good enough. So, I tore it open and swapped it out for an NF-A12x25 G2 spinner. To accomplish this, I had to swap the connector on the fan.
However, what happened next was crushing. I had done the math on the cable lengths prior to cutting out the grooves, but in doing so, forgotten to account for the fact that the 24-pin cable powering the motherboard would go through two 90-degree bends in the same direction, leaving me with a cable that ended up being too short.
This was a problem. There was no way I was going to extend 27 sleeved cables (the power supply uses doubles on some pins), and I certainly didn’t have time to wait for an order of custom cables to arrive.
In fact, I was so desperate to crack on with the build, I didn’t even want to remove the motherboard, because of those pesky but pretty thumbscrews – my fingers already hurt from installing them, and removing and re-installing them would probably add another hour to the process.
So, I did the only thing one could logically do in this scenario: surgery. I covered up my patient, marked out where I had to make the incisions, clamped it down, and went for it. I’ll let the picture speak for itself. At this stage in the build, it was terrifying to bust out the tools again. With the extra gap cut out from the spine to accommodate the cable that was too short, I popped the base of the case back on and reinstalled the power supply. Order was restored, for now.
GPU Install
Installing the GPU went smoothly and easily. I used a threaded insert and one of the leftover thumbscrews to fasten the GPU to the bracket, and then installed the GPU, with the bracket attached, into the PCIe slot. While still supporting the GPU by hand, the bracket was fastened into place at the correct height.
After this, the anti-sag nub was installed at the front of the system, between the spine and the graphics card. It was also adjusted to the correct height for a perfectly level GPU.
Cable management
Because the cable management at the back of the spine is fully open and exposed, I needed to make some custom cables for powering all the devices.
The first of these is a 4-pin fan extension cable, so that the three fans at the top could be controlled by a fan header at the bottom of the motherboard. For this, I sacrificed one of the 8-pin PCIe cables from the power supply.
From that same sacrificial cable, I also used two extra wires and sleeving to make an extension for the power button. I used the brown sleeving for this one, merging the two wires into one cable at the solder point, and pulled some extra scrap sleeving over the short bit of the power cable I had pulled from the other case. The power button header sits at the very front of the motherboard, so I wanted this to be covered in sleeving, with a bit of shrink-wrap to remove any fraying.
The two wires remaining on the 8-pin PCIe cable were soldered to the power button’s LED to feed it 12 V power.
I then sacrificed another 8-pin PCIe power cable from the power supply, and used half of it to make an internal USB 2.0 cable so that the RGB controller could be plugged in and controlled. Two SATA power cables were combined into one longer cable to power the RGB controller.
Finally, all the cables were tidied up with combs, and were glued in place using 3M 468MP double-sided tape.
The PSU compartment easily went on to become the tidiest chamber I’ve ever built in, thanks to the secret cavity at the bottom of the motherboard tray, where I could easily tuck what little cable excess I had. Because of this hidden cavity, this is also the first PC I’ve ever built in where not a single ziptie was needed or used.
System complete: Behold the Stout Owl
This build measures 23.8 cm wide, stands at 51.5 cm tall, and is 46.0 cm deep. It weighs in at a staggering 20.8 kg.
I drove over 842 km, over the course of 19 trips to various stores for supplies. Five splinters were removed from my hands and, at peak, I had 14 cuts on my hands at one given moment. 17 different finishes were tested. About a dozen items have been returned. One Makita 3AH 18V LXT battery died. One wood bit, two router bits, one jigsaw blade, and both blades for the circle and miter saw were worn out. An estimated 30 pieces of sandpaper were used up. Lastly, six different neighbors came over, curiously asking what I was working on.
And on at least 18 different days, the words “I will be done tonight” were spoken, 17 of which in vain.
