70's Hifi mod

[Dougie_Boy]

I am new to this forum, and there is a good reason i join.

having been a techy fool for a while im now, i have found myself in a job where i can afford to play around more with my hobbie.
in the last few months i bought myself some new kit which means my room is now full of old PC's.

i hate to see old PCs go to waste and so i have taken upon myself to build my wonderful woman a PVR to go under her tellybox.

the only problem was the case.

i did not want to use a "proper" media case, because it will cost a fair amount and i always wanted to try my hand at modding instead.

so recently trawling trough eBay i found this little gem, which i reckon, i just the right size for my very own PVR with a retro edge.

plan is as follows, i have a coolermaster musteteer to rewire into the place of the old analogue dials, see below

and then the main kit will be around the following:

3500+ AMD 64 (socket 754) @ 2.2
Gigbyte motherboard
Hauppauge Nova T 500 tuner (dual)
ATi 9600 128mb (passive with video out + DVI + SVGA)
768mb DDR 2
80gig HD* (will be upgraded to 500gig is it works out)
Onboard sound
Wireless card (D-link)
PSU might be an old dell 250watt, or a mini PSU dependent on space.

DVD RW will be hidden behind the cassette.

thoughts would be appreciated and if anyone else can point me to a similar project for guidance it would help.

looking at running XP MCE on it too, your thoughts?

building starts this weekend and god willing will be over in 2 weeks.

 

[Shambler]

This will be extremely legit!

 

[Dougie_Boy]

1st day over.

have taken the first casulties in the shape of 1 harddrive and 1 DVD rom drive.

have 2 more hard drives and 3 more CD roms to try so plenty to spare.

system is up and running XP media centre ed 2005 now, and has all the following running nicely. (final system is better than expected due to finding another 512 stick in my room)

system now stands at

2.4 ghz AMD 64 (socket 754)
1 gig 2700 DDR RAM
80gb Samsung
Lite On DVD RW
Gigabyte GA-K8U
250 Dell PSU
9600 Radeon (half hight)
Netgear Wifi card (half hight)

Stands to be quite nippy for some old parts in my room.

problems i can see arrising are the size of the HSF, which might need to be changed for a low profile one.

and the PSU is a bit big, so i might need to grab myself a mini one.

piccys to follow but for now its 00:40 and ive got work in a few hours.

tommorow the rest of the parts arrive so i can really get cracking. whoop whoop.

 

[Dougie_Boy]

lets start with a picture of the naked case.

as you can see we have plenty of room for components so far. (the motherboard fits nicely) the case is 128mm high, 385 across and 230mm and the dials and variable resistor handles are is good condition too. fully removable as well.

onto the how old the case is.

as you can see the buttons are just depressed by plastic extenders from the front of the case. hitatch at the forefront of high tech switches.

not much going on inside but none the less plenty of space.

stinks of fags to so tonight is dismantling and washing it.the black metal parts of the case will be resprayed and as soon as i have my dremmel drill im going to take the plastic dividers out.

currently at work while i write this so patience is killing me.

currently my major problems are the following, any help will be appreciated.

• PSU, where to mount is and a recommendation for a nice small quiet one
• where to mount the DVD drive. my original plan for the drive to be hidden behind the cassette bezel might not work.

i have been toying with the idea of not using an optical drive. i hardly use mine on my laptops and rely on flash much more now. i might mount a usb reader instead of the counter.

 

[stain.]

You could, instead of using an optical drive, put a USB multi card reader behind the tape deck. have it pop out. and just attach a dvd via usb there.

 

[shadowlord]

looks promising !
maybe you could stealth a slim-line dvd behind that lower alu section of the tape door ?

 

[themark]

That cassette door is just begging for an LCD behind it. And I agree, you should try to get a slot-load DVD to insert where the tape buttons are now. Any way to get the existing dials to use the data from the musketeer? That would be awesome.

Try to keep as many buttons functioning as you can for bonus coolness

 

[jackknife]

I wanted to recommend a Pico PSU, but then I looked over your hardware specs, and they are a bit to "watt-heavy" for the little bugger.
Try to fetch a PSU from a shuttle XPC, or get one from the company "Engelking" (they make power supplies for industrial uses, some of them are very flat and could be mounted to the side of the case. (they are regularly used in watercooling setups where the watercooling blocks are just mounted to one flat side of the PSU).