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Fenris_Ulf
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2004
- Messages
- 1,907
Well, to start off, my baby girl Eliana was born was born a month ago. While waiting for her to come home I had some free time so I started thinking about her room and came up with an idea. I decided to build a small media PC for music and paintings using mostly old stuff I had laying around. It doesn't have to be very powerful, just enough to play music and do basic stuff. I also wanted it to be as low profile as possible and not be intrusive in her room.
I had an old VIA C3 mini-ITX motherboard laying around from a carputer. I put a Thermalright HS-05 chipset heatsink on the CPU, which is about 100x better than the stock one. I also wanted it as quiet as possible, so I decided to try using a CompactFlash memory card as a budget SSD instead of a hard drive.
Some other components that might make it into the build. The PSU is a 200 watt Delta from www.allelectronics.com. It's only an inch or so wide, about 4" tall, and about 9" long. I had to take the small noisy 1" fan off the end, I'll remedy that later.
In the past I've worked with Sun external drive boxes. I've used model 411 and 811 boxes to build Gainclone amps and found that they're awesome to work with. I had a model 911 box that I never had done anything with and it was tall enough for the Thermalright heatsink and should have enough room for the mobo and everything else.
And taken apart:
Even though it's built like a tank, removing only four screws allows you to take everything out of the inside:
Checking how the major components will fit:
I then used a dremel to carve out a hole for the back plate:
The PSU is going to need a fan of some sort, so I found an old 70mm AMD CPU fan and positioned it so it would avoid the PCI slot on the mobo. I took the cover off and used a 62mm hole saw to cut a hole and drilled screw holes for the fan:
With the fan on, it's looking good:
The PSU wires are still waaaaay to short and it's a 24 pin PSU, so that had to be fixed. The easy way was to buy an adapter, but that's not the [H]ard way. I spliced in 8" of wires and sleeved it with Techflex as well as cut off the end four pins on the PSU plug:
Next up will be the modifications to the case itself.
I had an old VIA C3 mini-ITX motherboard laying around from a carputer. I put a Thermalright HS-05 chipset heatsink on the CPU, which is about 100x better than the stock one. I also wanted it as quiet as possible, so I decided to try using a CompactFlash memory card as a budget SSD instead of a hard drive.
Some other components that might make it into the build. The PSU is a 200 watt Delta from www.allelectronics.com. It's only an inch or so wide, about 4" tall, and about 9" long. I had to take the small noisy 1" fan off the end, I'll remedy that later.
In the past I've worked with Sun external drive boxes. I've used model 411 and 811 boxes to build Gainclone amps and found that they're awesome to work with. I had a model 911 box that I never had done anything with and it was tall enough for the Thermalright heatsink and should have enough room for the mobo and everything else.
And taken apart:
Even though it's built like a tank, removing only four screws allows you to take everything out of the inside:
Checking how the major components will fit:
I then used a dremel to carve out a hole for the back plate:
The PSU is going to need a fan of some sort, so I found an old 70mm AMD CPU fan and positioned it so it would avoid the PCI slot on the mobo. I took the cover off and used a 62mm hole saw to cut a hole and drilled screw holes for the fan:
With the fan on, it's looking good:
The PSU wires are still waaaaay to short and it's a 24 pin PSU, so that had to be fixed. The easy way was to buy an adapter, but that's not the [H]ard way. I spliced in 8" of wires and sleeved it with Techflex as well as cut off the end four pins on the PSU plug:
Next up will be the modifications to the case itself.
