Anyone here ever made some oem Dell or Hp computer look a lot better? I'm guessing this would largely be done through some kind of paint scheme. I need a new little htpc for my workout room, but I can't justify buying anything else than a cheap $200 newegg refurbished business computer. And just slap a half decent graphics card in there for 4k video. But I like a challenge! If I'm stuck with some oem case, I want to make it look good somehow. But how? Anyone here done up an oem case? Or perhaps have a link to somewhere I could see some good ones? Thanks!
not worth it dell and hp desktops are buil tlike tanks. you can do serious damage with just a side panel lol
Depends on the OEM, and depends what you mean by 'better'. It's the internal layout of oem cases that are usually the problem in my experience.
either spray it or vinyl wrap it, cheap and simple, you could create some decals with water slide decal paper? Lots of things that could be done, I am rubbish at this stuff but wrapped my daughters PC, on her laptop I printed off an a4 decal covering, no image of the laptop, just have the decal on my machine. I thought I did well, she thought it was cheesy and instead wants a new Anime covering of Toga.
This is excellent; the vinyl wrap comes off really well, but the graphic is excellent. It is cheesy, but in a good way
Yup I have officially become that parent 'When I was a lad....etc etc' she has it so good and she doesn't even know but that's our job I suppose, me and the missus sit in her chill out/play room saying to ourselves WTF, weirdly we are a little bit envious when we are reflecting on what we had to put up with despite being the pusher of cool stuff Vinyl is good if it is simple shapes and that particular case disassembled into loads of nice flat pieces which made it easier than most things but any detail like the keyboard holes and tiny fan holes on the top of that case and your life will ebb away as cutting it out with a craft knife whilst easy is very time consuming. I would very much recommend spray painting as I did with her laptop, a lot can be done with a simple colour and water slide decal paper. I get to do it all again soon, yay....I think, as my 1080Ti doesn't fit in that case so when I upgrade shortly I am going to have to do a transplant to new case so she can have my cast offs.
Kids nowadays etc. Oh, and as for the OP - that's precisely how and why Bit-tech was born nearly 20 years ago. There was almost no option to buy a 'cool' computer case back in the day, so modders took their tools and inspiration to OEM cases.
Kinda depends on the PC tbh. Some of the desktop designs are really hideous, looking at you HP, but a lot of them could blend into an AV pile under/near a TV with a few choice parts painted less garish colours.
Is there an archive or old Gallery somewhere? I bet there's some real gems to look at. I imagine some people got really creative and made some really nice modifications to some of those old oem cases. I'd love to see 'em. I know man! What happened to all the cool OEM cases that you'd see when you went to Best Buy and stuff? There are still a few, like the Asus Rogs. But not nearly as many as there used to be. Desktops have become largely business oriented now, unless you're a gamer. Everyone else wants portability. Laptops, phones, etc.
Back in my day we used to use car heat exchangers as watercooling radiators... None of this fancy 'pre-built' stuff! *grumble, groan, gerrof my lawn, etc...* All the old posts exist, you just have to go back enough pages to find them. The problem is that images links will almost certainly be broken now, a lot of image hosting sites that people used to use are now long defunct... Here's one of mine from 2003: https://forums.bit-tech.net/index.p...mple-window-mod-lots-of-pics-sorry-56k.36498/ - the image site I used is long dead though (also it wasn't an OEM case). As far as I understand, it wasn't possible to host images directly in the forum until quite recently (relatively speaking) - we were entirely reliant on external hosting. Consumers, in general, moved on to laptops, tablets, and phones. For the average person, any role that can't be filled by a tablet can be done by a laptop, there isn't very much need for to have a full-sized desktop PC. Of course lots of people are quite happy to sell pre-built general purpose desktop computers, but it's not a hugely profitable market for the big OEMs like Dell, HP, etc - their money comes from business customers.
Yeah it looks like that thread is a bit dead in terms of pictures. I really hope it's all somewhere though. I'd hate to think that all that work was lost forever. To the rest of us anyway. Hell maybe even to the modders, since they likely no longer own those old cases they modded so long ago.
I had a pop at a salvaged Xbox early on in lockdown, just to get it working and give it a fresh coat. Went from bog standard white to Gears of War black with crimson omen. I'm having trouble getting photos online (camera on phone was set to 4k and bit's limit seems to be about 17KB per picture) but will see what I can figure out once year-end is done. Anyway, my point was that spray paint is the way to go if possible. Sorts out the "multiple holes and craft knife" issue sandys mentioned earlier. Even made a spray booth from one of the many hundreds of Amazon boxes lying around...
Oooooh! I will see what I can achieve! Probably tomorrow morning now, but will try and do the bit massive proud. Nice...
