In need of a second project for while I work on Project: Adamantium I decided to embark on Project: Server (I need a better name, suggestions are welcome) The aim of this pc is to make a relatively fast, but near silent pc that will be run 24/7 as a file server. Original specification for this rig: Celeron 1.3GHz MSI Micro-ATX Socket370 Motherboard 512mb PC133 60GB HDD PCI SATA Card 2 x 200GB SATA Maxtor’s (from my pc) 350W Generic PSU Onboard GFX But after some thought I realised I had a dell sitting in the garage, spec below: P4 2.66GHz non-ht Dell Micro-ATX P4 478 Motherboard (only dell ive seen with a standard motherboard in a LONG time!) 512MB PC2700 20GB HDD 9200SE (I added it so it would be somewhat useful for a gaming machine) Dell 400w PSU But then I thought crap, that doesn’t have AGP, so I set out for a search for a nice M-ATX p4 478 motherboard with AGP, found quite a few, one of which took my fancy, so I bought it Then while browsing the wonderful E-Bay I had some nice thoughts, why should I slap a non-ht proc in it, when I could double the usefulness of this rig (dl machine, file server and a folder) by getting a HT proc So Im now going to get a lovely 3.2GHz (or thereabouts) P4 to go in this rig So the FINAL specs for this rig will be: P4 478 with HT (heck I don’t know what speed, 3ghz+ most likely) ASRock P4VM8 (has SATA onboard, saving me the hassle of getting a PCI SATA card) 512MB DDR400 (going to sell the stuff from the dell to buy some decent memory) 60GB IDE HDD (for OS) 2x 200GB SATA Maxtor’s (from my pc) Jeantech 450w PSU (used it to run my old Socket A rig, very well made unit) Enough Jabbering! Pictures of the case this will be going in ^ The case, its quite small, and I have painted it in the past (not the best paintjob tbh) ^ Showing the rather lame paintjob, its shinier in real life, but not amazing ^ Insides with the Celeron rig inside ^ A 120:1 will be going in the front, along with a custom made reservoir (out of 8mm ACRyan UV Green acrylic) Due to the fact I want this rig to be near silent I have decided to water cool it with some of the left over gear ive got from past ventures Water cooling spec: Asetek Antarctica CPU Block Asetek Northbridge Block Asetek GPU Block BIP 120:1 with 10mm push fit’s Custom made reservoir (8mm UV Green Acrylic ) **pump = undecided at current time** UV Green tubing (10mm) Plan tomorrow is to help my sister move out (so I can nab her room) and also get some work done on the chassis, aim is to have it powdercoated by next weekend :O the front will be the only part that wont be done next weekend, as it requires a lot of filler work, and some DVD drive stealthing action This is just a quick mod to keep me going. Also tomorrow I should re-sleeve the Jeantech PSU, as I did a botch job on it last time! (didn’t have the right tools) and also need to amputate some wiring.
Hello all my chum’s So last night I was bored out of my skull and wasn’t tired, so I decided to get a crucial part of the mod done, I got the front 120mm cut out, but instead of a plain old boring circle I decided to allow maximum airflow through the radiator by making a square with little tabs for the fan. After that, I realised the screws I wanted to use wouldn’t go into the radiator, so I re-tapped that today, and modified the front of the case a bit to allow the fan to be in front of the chassis (to give me more crucial space inside!) I like the way it’s turned out, and there is just enough space for me to throw my pump in front of the radiator, which means it will get cooled by the air off the radiator. A really awesome thing happened today, while returning home to pick some more stuff up for my sisters move (finally done ) I saw my neighbour, and I remembered that he had a 3ghz p4 socket 478 processor he bought by mistake (he was meant to get an lga775) so I popped round and asked if he still had it, the one thing I forgot was that when he tried to put it in the lga775 socket is that the pins got bent, so after using the screwdriver to straighten them its good as new , another thing is that Im now committed to building him a media centre with the spare lga775 processor he has sitting next to his rig so I don’t mind, it gives me something to do along with all my other mods Another cool thing about this case is that ive got 2 fronts for it, so I may mod both, one for subtle running, and another one with some mad tribal designs on it cause Im cool. ^ rather yummy ^ good condition ^ see the bent pins ^ a rather nice stock hsf ^ can anyone see the difference? Yes, that’s right, a ton of dremel disk dust! ^ a cool thing about this case, it has some nice slots so the 120mm can breathe nicely ^ How the 120mm will be ^ Another angle ^ The cut out – It allows more air to go through the radiator, as its kind of designed like the shroud on the radiator ^ After removing the dust, looks a lot nicer ^ Re-tapping the screw holes, I like my tungsten steel tap and die set ^ looking good space wise ^ Tons of space, perfect to place my pump in front Now I just need to find a suitable pump, Im currently thinking of using a CSP Mag, but I just need to find one (over-clock are out of stock, so are cooler-cases, which sucks ass! I just need a pump ASAP!) Hope you all like, now comments!
Well, I got a bit more work done I decided to use my Tank-O-Matic on the back of the case instead of making my own, for the fact that if I was to make my own it would have to be tiny! I need to get 3 maybe 4 HDD’s in this pc! So I set out to sort out the CD rack so I could make a nice HDD holder to hang off it First problem was there were some tags for where the original hdd holder slipped on, so first thing to do was to remove them easy enough so after an attack of the dremel ^ the tags ^ Tags gone ^ holder things gone Now that’s all out the way I plan on making a HDD holder (with a holder for an 80mm fan, need to cool those HDD’s Think I may just make the HDD holder out of 5mm UV green acrylic, or I may go x-treme and use 8mm! lol… Talked to Gav who works at our local electroplater and he said that if I just drop off the stuff he’ll get it done sorted Wonder what to get chromed maybe the BIP will look nice in chrome, DVD-RW in chrome…. PSU in chrome….. damn, shiny chrome + shiny black best combo ever O’ yeah, before I forgot I finally decided to order my pumps! 2x CSP Mags (1 for my main rig, one for this rig) so they should be here Tuesday
Ok, done a bit more work After cutting the tabs off, I was knackered so had a bit of a sleep, then I woke up and I got bored, so I decided to make HDD Rack Version 1.0 *how cool does that sound!* The only real problem at the moment is im running out of space rapidly I think I may have to cut up the DVD drive holder to allow me to get some more valuable space back, so I can move the HDD holder up into the un-used area there, but that means I will have to make a new HDD holder to allow for the changes ^ Looky looky, big sheet of acrylic! ^ My magical cutting rig ^ One cut-up piece of acrylic – lets get drilling! ^ 30 holes later we’ve got a holy piece of acrylic! ^ After some bending…. Unfortunately the acrylic got too hot and bubbled on the first bend (due to me not being awesomely awake) ^ where it will go if I don’t move it up more, it’s a bit of a bitch ‘cause that’s right where the radiator begins! So Im going to mock it all up properly and if it doesn’t work I’ll either re-make the holder or move it up after some dremelin’! Some comments wouldn’t go a miss….
Great work with the acrylic piece , love it. you should paint the interior, it look's like **** :\, may-be some bondo job keep up the good work and again, love the acrylic bend (how did you bend it?)
READ THE THREAD!? ive mentioned about 5 times now that the whole case is getting powdercoated! i clamped the acrylic in my work bench (in between 2 pieces of wood) and used my magical heat gun to bend the acrylic once ive got some of this science work done im going to make another piece, 'cause im not happy with the current HDD rack. if you dont know what powdercoating is, do a quick google, and you'll find out its far better than painting, it involves electro-statically charging particles of powder, and charging the case with the opposite charge (opposites attract in physics) and then the powder sticks to the case, which is then heated to about 600c, melting the powder to the case, making a perfectly even, smooth, near indestructable surface, which means you can hit it with a hammer and instead of it chipping (like ****** paint would) it will just dent.
OK So I decided that the whole HDD rack idea wasn’t working for me So I needed a fix, but no matter what there was no way I could get 4 HDD’s in there without some radical changes (gawd this case IS small!) So I decided to do some ghettoification I removed the entire top thing that basically added strength and ripped the piss when it came to wiring. So being ghetto I removed it, and did some measurements, and have come up with a new way to give me some space for my lovely HDD’s! Instead of having an empty 5-1/4” bay that I really cant use, I decided it would be smarter to make an acrylic mount to hold the top DVD drive, and that would give me tons more space to work with (a good 5cm or so) which is just what I need for my HDD’s to fit in. So after a lot of measuring I decided to start making, the piece is 18cm long, and will have a 1.5cm tab at the end (which I have bent) to allow it to be mounted to the case in the same way as the old metal version. ^ see that HUGE thing spanning the whole case, well watch ^ BAM its gone, now look at all that space ^ How the old DVD drive mounted (ok so that’s a CDRW but you get the idea ) notice how Im going to have to make it so the drive is in the right position to line up with the front properly ^ my weapon of choice for this mod – some UV Green 3mm ACRyan Acrylic, this stuff is awesome, really nice to work with. ^ What you get after the attack of the jigsaw, a nice straight piece of acrylic that just happens to be perfectly square ^ The piece that will be used for the far side of the DVD holder (right hand side) ^ After some quick bending action…. Perfect ^ What it will be replacing ^ How it is replacing it ^ Rivet’s resting in place (Im holding it so the rivets don’t fall out) its going to be bolted together until the chassis is powdercoated. ^ quick view to show how it looks at the mo’ Now the plan is not to leave the piece of acrylic 8cm wide (a DVD drive is 4cm wide ) so I plan on doing some nice cutting and a bit of acrylic bending tomorrow, so the DVD drive gets some support from underneath, then ive just got to line it all up with the front, drill a few holes, and presto ive got loads more space Comments please
What kind of magical device is needed? Will my heat shrink heat gun get hot enough to bend acrylic? I think the powder coating is going to look
Hi mate its cool to get a comment from you! your work rocks! sooo clean and perfect... well mine on setting 1 is about 400c, setting 2 is 600c can your heat gun hit 600c? if so then yes it will work! my heatgun was like £5, so its definatly worth it tbh
good man now get some work done!!! project server is actually one of my boredom killer projects keeps me sane tbh ive just done a ton of designs for the front, i think it'll look sweet all litup! ive decided to put 3x hdd's under the dvd drive, and have a 120mm blowing over them cause i rox
Ok, done a bit more work, not a lot, but some So today I set out to finish all my work, which I have bar one page (about to do it) So I did 8 pages of work, then decided to go for a ride, hopped on my motorbike, started to move forward and shizzle my foshizard…. My rear tires flat, so I went into the garage, turned the compressor on, pumped up the rear (its got a slow puncture, so it let me get to where I needed to go) hopped on my bike and popped down to the local bike place, but they couldn’t fix it, so if anyone knows how far Farncombe to Shalford is, you’d understand why I DIDN’T want to ride from Farncombe to Shalford, it may not seem far, but with a tire that was gradually deflating it was a pishtake. So I got my tire changed, one thing ive been meaning to do for a while. So that’s some of my moolah gone…. (I only had £15! And it was £22.50, so ive got to go back soon and give them some more moolah. So when I got back I had some breakfast (at 5:00pm – that’s right) and popped into the garage….. from here on the pictures and a little text will say a lot ^ see the problem ^ how I thought I’d fix it, but in the end I ended up using my vice about 5 times… ^ a cool shot of how I use a piece of laminate flooring to make sure the piece is straight ^ The sexy piece of acrylic on the to be mocked up CDRW – notice the little cut, keep your eyes open to what happens to it ^ A few holes (4) drilled…. We’ve got a holder ^ OLD OLD OLD cd drive up top, newish CDRW bottom…. Spot the difference ^ I burnt my finger to get this picture, it was hot! But I thought id show an in work shot. ^ All bent round I used the old cd drive ‘cause its longer, and means the whole piece had support while I bent around it, plus its so old I didn’t care if the heat killed it! In this picture the piece doesn’t look like its fully bent to the drive, but trust me…. It is. ^ A picture with the smaller drive – I made it larger for a reason…. You’ll see! ^ Another shot – I think its going to look awesome when the drive is chromed ^ A big problem - this is what happens when you heat up a different part of the acrylic, it allows another area to relax so I had to fix that! ^ Not perfect, but A LOT better ^ In the case, Im just holding the drive there ‘cause it can’t support a drive on one side (Im sure most acrylic bar 8mm would struggle to do that! ^ How it now looks with some rivets temporarily holding it in, Im going to have to use a piece of steel to put behind the acrylic to prevent the rivets cracking the acrylic…. Would suck to do all this work for nout! Ok so that wasn’t really much of an update, but I still got this one last page of science to do, so once that’s done I’ll go do some more work like maybe start making the HDD rack ‘cause last night I worked out a design that allows me to run a lovely 120mm on the front of the case, to cool the HDD’s :O
Hello all you d00ds (and d00dettes) After a relatively un-inspiring day at college and an annoying ride home in the pissing rain (reminds me I need to buy them waterproof over trousers!) I got home to find a rather yummeh package…. That package just happened to be my ASRock P4VM800 upon opening the box I was quite happy, the board is friggin tiny :O just what It needs to be for project server So I tried to put the CPU in the socket, but as I expected there were still some bent pins, so first I sorted them out, all of them nice n’ straight now, so I finally got the CPU in the socket, got the heatsink on. First plan was just to use a shuttle silentx 250w psu to power it, but the molex’s are all too short for me to use as a test bed rig, but it worked, so Im now using the actual PSU that I will be using, the Jeantech 450w (which isn’t under any stress surprisingly, and seems to be silent ) When I first booted it up using my dell 24” it had an annoying thing that the bios would be over to the right so it was near unreadable, so I wired up my kvm and put it on the dell 15” to my left, and it worked perfectly. After flicking through the bios I noticed some nice features (easy oc’ing) and went downstairs to get the HDD and IDE cable, wired them up, and gave it a quick boot, and after a fresh OS install its now sitting here pretty, it seems quite responsive, and I haven’t even installed all the drivers ^ mobo goodness 1 ^ mobo goodness 2 ^ yummeh cpu ^ first wire up with the shuttle psu into my dell 24” ^ see the problem…. ^ yummehly setup with the Jeantech I cant believe that my 5900U is BIGGER than the motherboard :O its soo mad I really want to get 1gb of ram in this beast, just need to find some cheap, but fast stuff (almost tempted to get 1gb 2-2-2-5 for the sakes of it) I need your comments and opinions
So I got home today Totally bloody drenched again, I HATE RAIN AND BRITISH WEATHER!!! So I go out this morning, hop on my bike, get to college fine, full speed ahead, finish lessons get bored @ college and decide to go home, full speed…. Then I have to go up for some personal tutor crap, so with all intentions to go (I normally just miss it) I hopped on my bike and left the house, half way down the road I notice there is no bloody power, I open the throttle and it just dies, like its out of fuel, so I just keep going, and I notice my exhaust is loose, go home, do it up, go back out hoping that was it, but no, the bloody ignition coil was wet, so it wasn’t firing @ full throttle so it took me 40 minutes to get to college… normally 5-10 minutes to say the least I was pished, plus it was pissing it down with rain! As always, so I got totally drenched, then had to wear the soaking clothes for 3 hours of lessons So today I decided to use water for something more useful…. To cool my p4! First off was to get the stuff together, which took a few minutes…. Bummer is that ive had to use the res for Adamantium to run it, as I couldn’t find the 1/4” 10/8 compression fittings I was going to use on the tank-o-matic, so hopefully I will find them sometime soon and use that res instead (seeing as it is the res that I plan on using!) ^ I decided to attack the 9600pro first (it’s a pro advantage, xt spec ) ^ had some pretty funky thermal compound on it, was like a real deep silver! Nice stuff, shame its gawn ^ the Asetek gpu block after trimming the other mounting wings off (for larger nvidia’s i suspect) as they hit the capacitor ^ fitted you can see how close it is to the capacitor! ^ in the motherboard, Its touching the pci slot next to it, but tbh I couldn’t give a crap as long as it works! ^ cpu cooler taken off, notice how crappy the stock thermal compound is! It’s a solid! You’ll also notice that the p4 retention bracket has been removed, to allow me to install the waterblock ^ new thermal paste and Asetek mounting studs in place ^ the block finally in place yay ^ check out the AWESOME-ly shite contact the NB cooler had! I mean w00t w00t I can see why it got hot! ^ all the blocks done yay ^ looks yummeh! ^ all plumbed up and ready to go! Which she now is Tis sitting pretty @ 42c full load and is A LOT quieter, im very impressed with the CSP and am very glad its going to be in server, ‘cause its nice n’ quiet! And doesn’t vibrate too much… I must admit I need to order a ton of stuff, such as a new psu because this one is getting rather toasty!!! And I don’t want to add another 2 HDD’s to a psu that is struggling!
Finally did the little bit of metalwork I needed to do on the front of the case and I like the way it turned out…. 3 HDD’s in a small space are going to make a lot of heat, to shift this heat ive decided to add another 120mm on the front of the case (like the rad fan, the fan will be on the outside of the chassis) which means there will need to be even more venting on the front o’ well you’ll like what ive got planned for the vent’s ^ The fan shroud I plan on using on the BIP – need to do a lot of work on it, but it will be quite sweet when its done ^ A slight bit of work done, still got tons left ^ Using the shroud to get an idea of what it will look like ^ Another angle ^ Where I plan to cut, another square hole – to allow more airflow through ^ all cut out yay ^ what it now looks like ^ did a bit of work on the back hole, and attacked it with the orbital sander to see what it looked like, but gave up as the whole case is getting shot blasted….. meh So now there’s just a bit of work to do on the motherboard tray then this bad boy will be off to get shot blasted and powdercoated! Which will be nice That reminds me I also need to cut the window…. Which I still have to design! Time to get drawing **hums a little tribal tune** yup yup If you didn’t know, this case will have the same style theme as Adamantium…. Tribal
your water ment too be that colour?? You gonna get it sand blasted before coating, what they charging you too powder coat it .. nice little box any future plans too add more storage and maybe a gig NIC ?? morgan.
Did a bit of work on the case today I think its nearly ready for shotblasting/powdercoating after some final bits of work here and there. ^ the front of the chassis nearly done ^ another angle ^ front of the case removed to start sanding/modding some more things ^ flatpack pc… maybe ikea would sell it ^ back of the pc before ^ back after sanding ^ back and front after sanding – I don’t know WHY I did this, but I was bored…. ^ plans for the mobo tray ^ what ended up happening to the mobo tray, I couldn’t be bothered to cut that window, so just cut a huge chunk off the mobo tray, works better
