Post your "Ghetto Mod" pics

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my dvd burners died the other day so i had to rig up a external IDE drive to burn something important till my new burner got here.

piggy backed it to a IDE HDD encloser

 
Got into cryptocurrency mining for a little while this was my first attempt at making one. It worked great just ugly.

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Cleaned it up with a milk crate.

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Have three Gigabyte GV-R927OC-2GD R9 270 OC 975MHZ 2GB video cards doing the work.
 
So... two ghetto things here... one, my fave drill, and two, a mobo I just finished re-heatsinking.

Drill first.

Back in the 90s, Mom bought a Craftsman 6v rechargeable drill. Looked like this --

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[Image found on fleaBay, reupped elsewhere...]
'bout two years ago, a decade after it had died (wouldn't charge) I opened it up. Batteries had blown up all over the insides, nothing salvageable but the motor/gearbox/chuck assembly. Even the damn switch was rusty from battery acid gunk! Of course the batteries were unlabeled, had to be NiCDs tho. Buncha trash.

So I saved the motor assembly. At some point I needed to drill some holes in a PCB and it was the only chuck in the house that would take a 3/64" bit. A little on the large side, but I didn't know that (and the 1/32" bit wouldn't fit. LOL. Too small.) Rigged it up with four C batts in a holder. Later on, a Coleman LED lantern (it's the twisty knob one with four D batts -- don't buy them, they really suck, design flaw in the switch mechanism) died on me, so I used the batt holder and a spare switch as an upgrade. Great for putting holes in all sorts of stuff! That motor is a Johnson Electric model, so it rocks... oh yeah, solid core speaker wire for the connections...

Pics of the current model (no image of the one with the C batts, sorry...) --

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...yes, I know my desk is a pigsty. Shaddup, I don't give a shit :D

Then there's the motherboard. Commell LE-370Z aka LE-370CM6. Celeron M ULV 600MHz CPU (Banias-512 core), a gig of RAM (that's all it will take) and the upgrade that made me change out the horrible horrible heatsink once and for all (no really, it was, it was idling at the BIOS health screen @ 70 C!) -- an ATi RageXL MiniPCI graphics card (the necessary cable for testing is in the mail).

No pics of the process (sorry!) but -- the black heatsink I needed to cut some fins off of, because it wouldn't let the card fit otherwise... solution? Rip 'em out with needlenose pliers. Seriously. Cheap heatsinks are /cast/ -- the only milling/machining done (if any) is to lap the bottom where it meets a chip. Cast metal is /always/ more brittle than machined metal, so it's not that challenging to break the stuff. Similar process with the bigger silver heatsink, ripped off one fin, hacksawed away some stuff that needed to come off, drilled it with my fave drill (the one I just finished describing) and put it on with a screw, a paper washer, and a ziptie. Fan is a Papst model out of a long-since-junked 3com SuperStack II Ethernet Hub 500... it's one of two I have from that thing. Added a peewee self-stick heatsink from fleaBay to the RageXL chip, it's probably about a watt and a half TDP (whole card is ~2w) so it could use some cool. Enough blabbing, though, here's pics... don't let your eyes bleed out too much :p

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Oh yeah... that weird weird Commell board, being exactly that, is a 3.5" SBC -- mobo the size of a desktop hard drive! Whee... oh, and that thing that looks like a PCI card connector? It is -- it's the /host/ connector, though. Imagine that. I have a riser for it (chipset graphics don't want to work lol) and it's two PCI slots on there. Ha! I have to wonder what Commell was smoking when they designed that thing... I really do...
 
Dunno, haven't tested it yet. Waiting on the cable for the MiniPCI card, lol, it'll be here Friday prolly...
 
lol no way brah

Oh yes. It's still pluggin' away too. I dropped the fan speed down to about 40% and Idle temps are around 40*C, but it still maxes out just about 50*C at load. All that at 3.9GHz, with the iGPU cranked to 900MHz
 
Oh yes. It's still pluggin' away too. I dropped the fan speed down to about 40% and Idle temps are around 40*C, but it still maxes out just about 50*C at load. All that at 3.9GHz, with the iGPU cranked to 900MHz

lol thats like many wrongs that make a right, right? :D
 
Well shoot, might as well add mine. Hold on to your butts...just a few.:D

Big shout out to Ace Hardware for being right across the street where I used to live to help me mod everything! :p

#:
1. Dual monitor arm mount to glass to desk with added 5.1 surround speaker mounts and light.


As I bought a new desk and just upgraded my PC I needed a way to mount the monitor arm as I didn't want to clamp it to the glass and break it. So I made a wood mount that is attached to the desk's backbone. The reason it sticks out a bit is because the the desk's metal back was 1/2mm thick so I used a shelf board to reenforce it.

You can also see where I drilled 2 holes to hold the back speakers using 1/4 aluminum rods covered in red PC wire mesh. L-channel (half painted with permanent marker) for the 2 front channels mounted to the VESA mounts, and a flat bar for the center that slid between the back of the monitor and VESA mount. Center speaker also doubles as a chair for my Petro-Pal, Dr. Arson I rescued form the clearance bin when I worked at Toy R Us back around 2000.
What is a Petro-Pal you didn't ask?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffsBrM3WFSY

The top the dual monitor arm had a plastic cap that was drilled used JB Weld to a old goose neck halogen clamp lamp to it, minus the clamp.




2. Laptop swing arm from a old CRT Clamp Arm.
Remove CRT tray and mount a laptop cooler.

Arm mounted to large wood cutting board mount to file cabinet that was left on from when I had my 60lb dual mid tower PC case on there.


3. Home LCD stand converted from a CRT base TV stand.


-Took off the hutch, saved the top shelf with the CD racks. Removed the hutch sides.
-Raised the CRT shelf, add bookshelf to the lower back to keep shelf from drooping and to use for back of relocated CD rack, added a center support cut from one of the hutch's side to keep the LCD shelf from drooping bet CRT shelf and LCD shelf. Added wood stock (painted with black marker again) to sides of LCD shelf for added height for DVR.
-Added window tint to glass door, 1/4 in plywood to back of cabinets for support and fan exhausts.
-Removed stock feet and added caster wheels so it move easier.


-Stick figure lamps were candle holders now filled silicone that holds bulb sockets for LED lamps.
Old diagram of what CRT looked like.
 
Tablet stand made from some junk I found at work. Old monitor stand, binder clips, cable ties, laptop case foam and part of a Dell hard drive caddy.

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Don't have the correct cable to hook your monitor up? I'm sure most of you have enough adapters to make any situation work. Kinda like this:

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In case you are interested, that is a mini-DP adapter connected to a DisplayPort active adapter connected to a DVI cable with a HDMI adapter on the end of it.
 
Don't have the correct cable to hook your monitor up? I'm sure most of you have enough adapters to make any situation work. Kinda like this:


In case you are interested, that is a mini-DP adapter connected to a DisplayPort active adapter connected to a DVI cable with a HDMI adapter on the end of it.

So all that was to go from mini-DP to HDMI which is like a $15 cable?
 
I did this to my brothers PC last year. He had no room on his desk for a tower. So I found a box to fit in those cubbies, slapped a button on it, and called it a day.

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I secured the PSU with cardboard and used an old mobo tray from an mATX case. It looks pretty neat inside. Sadly, I have no other pictures.
 
It's too neat. Where's the electrical tape, duct tape, rubberbands, etc.

0 food stamps.
 
Built a little lab for some coworkers and I at my workplace. None of this stuff was even working when I was hired here, just a closet filled with "trash and nonworking computers". But with plenty of free time between getting actual work done and waiting on help desk calls, I was able to put to work some linux and cisco skills ( and thus got some more work leads with my job ) to create a Whats Up Gold monitoring server for our lan, a VSphere server that runs a few test hosts for penetration testing, a 2.6 GHz P4 with hyperthreading in a scrapped poweredge 850 for our local file share (runs a headless ubuntu server os) on a raid0 ultrascsi320 setup from a server that was struck by lightning, a scrapped catalyst 3550 switch and cisco asa (set up for training not functionality), and the terminal which is a dedicated kali linux tower for pen testing.
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Sure, lol not that ghetto since all the crap is in boxes still. The cisco console cable that I used to configure the asa and switch takes the cake.
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We do have some nice 20MB/s download rates from our PE850 linux file share accross our whole lan haha.
 
went ahead with the box fan air purifier ghetto mod:

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under my desk and out of the way. hoping it reduces dust in the room/on desk/in computer.
 
under my desk and out of the way. hoping it reduces dust in the room/on desk/in computer.

Those corrugated micro particle filters are too restrictive for a box fan, it'll just cause the motor to fail prematurely because it overheats from lack of airflow.

The best filter you can put on a box fan are those thick blue spun fiberglass furnace filters. They won't catch the fine stuff, but they'll catch a decent amount of the larger particles, skin flakes and pet hair. You can also take them outside and clap them out to reuse them over and over again.

Anyway, here's my ghetto rig:

Do anyone remember these from 1999/2000?
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They originally came with a Pentium III 500, 128 MB of RAM and an 8 GB hard drive with a 90W PSU.

Mine is a bit different.. (and excuse the large images)

Front view:
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That's an IDE laptop DVD drive on a really hard to find Startech laptop IDE to desktop SATA converter. Before I found that adapter, I thought the unit would always have an external optical drive since the original bay drive was both impossible to find and proprietary. Since there's no real way to mount it, it's pressed in with craft sticks.

Side view with door removed:
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The original Pentium III was cooled by the PSU fan with a passive heatsink. A 65W AMD processor wouldn't fare well at all like that so I had to cut a hole under the hard drive mount with tin snips and a hack saw. This is an old picture though, I had to enlarge the hole so I could fit a better copper heatsink since the CPU kept overheating under heavy load (garbage OEM AMD APU heatsinks.) Since the drive mounts are cut away, the only real solution for a full sized hard drive is to set it upside down on the side like that.

LM386 Op Amp for the internal mini-sub:
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For whatever reason, Compaq put a really nice mini-sub (seen on the lower right of the pic) in this machine. The original motherboard had a special monaural amp and plug on the motherboard to drive it. Since the new motherboard obviously didn't have an integrated amp, I wanted to find a solution so I could use the mini-sub and not have it sit there and collect cobwebs.

The end result I came to was to build an op amp on a piece of perf board and figure a way to wire it up. I ended up finding some spots on the front panel audio jacks to grab the audio channels from, and through creative use of the Realtek control panel, they're always on (since the audio chipset can't detect my op amp being connected.)

Motherboard and crap:
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It was ridiculously hard to find a motherboard that would fit in this thing. The original Compaq motherboard used standard MicroATX mounts, but the motherboard was extremely short width wise. I think I looked through probably 50 motherboards before I found this one that just barely fit.

All of the green electrical tape around is because I had to rewire pretty much every front panel connection since they were all non-standard. Even the USB header was completely bogus and took me hours to sort out.

Power Supply:
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To those of you who remembered the 90W PSU bit and scream at me "how did you get a 65W CPU to run on a 90W power supply!"

Well, it isn't. The PSU was another few hours of head scratching because it was completely proprietary, there was nothing like it that existed. Then I realized that with a moderate amount of modification, I could swap the guts of a FSP 300W MicroATX power supply into the Compaq unit if I rotated the PCB 90 degrees and extended the mains wires by just a few inches. Heavy amounts of electrical tape were used because it was somewhat of a tight fit. You can see the modifications I did to the primary MOSFET heatsink. The fins allow more airflow and it runs much cooler since I had to cut a square out of it to make the mains plug fit.

Final Specs:
Motherboard: MSI FM2-A55M-E33
CPU: AMD A8-6500 (quad 3.5 GHz)
GPU: Radeon HD 8570D
RAM: 8 GB DDR3-1600 Corsair XMS
HDD: 160 GB Seagate

So now I can take a semi-decent machine to a lan party that looks like an antiquated piece of shit and complete the disguise with a Windows 98 skin for Windows 7 and not have to worry about people trying to steal the machine. I even left the Pentium III sticker and "Designed for Windows 98 or Windows 2000" stickers on the front lmao.
 
went ahead with the box fan air purifier ghetto mod:

under my desk and out of the way. hoping it reduces dust in the room/on desk/in computer.

I have thought about this too, I live in a dusty town. I think I might do the same as well.
 
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