Scratch Build – In Progress The A3 Media PC: "the box is probably worth something too" Finished 22th Feb

This is a brilliant mod, you've managed to cover a lot of what I've been encountering in my soon-to-be-started Xbox360 case build.

Thanks for the link to the acrylic website, that's just what I've been after. My googling powers are obviously crap...

 

Yup it's a good site, it makes all the difference when you can get a hold of the materials you want easily.

When I was ordering my perspex, I was wondering if they did cell cast or extruded (explaination here). So I phoned them up to ask, and they said they get through so much black pespex they could offer me cast at no extra cost. Great stuff. I haven't worked with extruded perspex, but the cell cast stuff is awesome.

My top tip would be to ask them if cut it to size for you. For me, that was one of the toughest bits, and if I didn't have my dad's circular saw to borrow it would have been an expensive outlay. I presume they cut the sizes the list from a larger sheet, so it should be no real hassle for them to cut to the sizes you need. You could phone them up and ask.

From to the design of the A3-PC, all the home-cut edges are hidden away, but if I get round to doing my next project I'll certainly be looking to get panels cut to size professionally.

 

Wow, more awesomely useful tips.

I'll be making the cuts myself, but only because I quite enjoy working with acrylic, and want to keep it fairly cheap.

 

I really like your mod!

 

I decided to add in a Zalman fan controller I had sitting about. The Tri-cools are ok on their low setting for my gaming pc, but I wanted to slow them down even more for use here.

I measured up the fan controller, which conveniently seems to have been designed in millimetres. I needed a row of 6 holes for the LEDs, and another row of 6 for the knobs themselves. After thinking for a while about how to mount it, I realised I didn't have a combo of screws, nuts, or standoffs that could mount it. The PCB needs about 5mm of clearance at the front. Having ghetto-threaded the standoffs onto the motherboard, I gave it another go here. Two bits of perspex provided a replacement for coarse thread 3mm nuts.





Awesome.

I drew out a template for the cuts, and chewed some guide holes for the drill bit - otherwise it tends to wander before it starts cutting.




Cut, and mounted;





Tan-fastic.


During the course of building this mod, it became apparent that most of the perspex I'd cut away had accumulated in the front of my antec 900.



Things, as they stood a few days ago:

 

Having run the system with the tri-cools and the 60mm cpu fan turned all the way down, it still wasn't exactly quiet.

By picking up the HDD rack I worked out half the problem. Although the drives are held with a foam and elastic combo, there is still a lot of vibration transfered to the structure => noise.

I put rubber spacers on the mounting screws for the HDD rack, and felt pads where the rack itself touches the floor of the case.



Note that the bottom hard drive is no longer used - I reinstalled windows on the newer, quieter, larger, faster, and healthier sounding 160GB drive. It still needs to be there though, because without the elastic pulls the rack all out of shape. Not very practical.

The other source of noise was my mighty HEC 300W PSU - specifically the 80mm fan. The sensible option would have been to get a new PSU, but even a VX450 is £60 these days. **** that.



It may not be apparent from the photo, but to get the fan out you either had to take the thing properly to bits, or come up with (once again) a more ghetto solution:



Pliers > PSU.


Remember kiddie-winks, don't try this at home, or school, or work, or in a caravan.

I picked up two rather nice 2000rpm Sharkoon Silent Eagles from OC-Uk, the second being to replace the CPU 60 fan. I'm not sure exactly how these reduce noise (seperation shouldn't be an issue except at high pressure ratios, but I won't turn this into an aerodynamics blog), nonetheless they're fairly quiet and move an adequate amount of air.

I thought for a while whether these would be enough coolingfor the PSU, and came up with the following arguments:
1. The sleeve bearing fan in the PSU is pretty old. All the noise doesn't strictly mean it's moving a lot of air, though I've no idea how much exactly.
2. I run a 1.3Ghz duron and Geforce 4 420MX (the heatsink on my P5K southbridge is almost as big as it's). Power hungry it is not, so the PSU should be at fairly low loads, certainly >50%.
3. I've never really noticed the PSU exhaust to be hot before, so the 22cfm of the Sharkoon should be enough. It's supplied directly with fresh air anyway, unlike in most PCs.
4. With a little maths, 22cfm is enough to raise the exhaust temp by 18C over ambient if the PSU is putting in 300W of heat. I'm sure my PSU is more than 50% efficient. It's never very warm in the flat anyway.

Confident in that, I fitted the new sharkoon fan. It was a shame to cut the nice cable sleeve.



All good.


I did a little testing on my desk to make sure everything was ok. The fan I removed howls away at about 4000rpm plugged into 12V, even louder than it was in the PSU. I can only assume it's throttled somehwhat with temperature.


Funnily enough, if you don't plug in a keyboard at start-up, the motherboard stops to tell you. Press F1 to resume.

 

It's stopped because you've got it set to Halt on All errors, rather than All but Keyboard.

Nice work.

 

Next, I had to mount the on/off switch and front USB ports. I'm not exactly sure what I'll be plugging into them but they make it look more like a PC. There's also the tricky question of moutning the blanking plates for the CD and DVD drives - I'm still thinking on that.



I cut three equally sized bits from a spare peice of perspex, and drew out a template. The template wasn't too important, so long as the switch and ports would fit in the gap above the DVD drive.

I have a 19mm drill bit which is just the right size for the 22mm vandal switch, but my £10 drill ran out of puff pretty quickly. In the end I drilled through with a 7mm, then nibbled away with the dremel - the rounded engraving head made light work of perspex. I made a rough circle with this, then used the circular sanding head to finish the hole.



The USB ports were a bit less elegant, I started cutting out a rectangle with cutting discs, and finished the job with a collection of files.

I did this for both the 'bezel' and the front wall of the case itself, with the USB ports taken from a rear PCI slot, and secured with screws.

Being designed for a PCI slot, the internal USB cable isn't very long though. I looked around on the internet for an extender, but these retail at around £5 for each 4 pin USB head, and I'd need two.

In the end, I did the ghetto thing and borrowed a firewire cable (which I've never used) and bodged an extender. Simply extending the internal cable would have been harder, as the earth wire is used as the cable sleeve.





Not bad:





On a functional level, the box is pretty much done. I just need to polish the edges, and work out how to put the blanking plates on the end of the cd trays - I need something roughly 5mm thick, sticky yet squishy. I'll experiment.




After a week's work I sat down to take in the delights of my new Media PC by watching Wipeout (feat Richard Hammond) on iplayer, and drank a few beers from my fave Boddington's glass... actually it was Tennets, with a continental head.

 

Well deserved beers, it looks great, nice work

 

Looking very good. Nice work.

 

try halfords /motor factor for some number plate sticky pads thay come in 3mm and 5mm super strong glue with foam in the middle.
have used these on my dvd player door stil stuck on after 2 years
nice case must start my build soon

 

Hello

I've pretty much finished the box now. It's not perfect, you still can't actually screw the lid closed, but from a functional and aesthetic sense it is finito.







I managed to attach the CD drive bezels with a combo of cardboard, scrap perspex spacer, and lots and lots of superglue. It's far from glamorous, but it works.






Overall it's very quiet. The air cooling is virtually silent, the only noise is from the HDD drive, despite being heavily isolated. The DVD is also rather wooshy when in use, but not too distracting for a film.

As a media pc, it's reasonably proficient. DVDs play fine (mostly), i-player and 4OD go pretty well, music is fine. It can't play anything HD, but then it's only a 1.3Ghz duron... and I don't really have anything HD to play, so meh.

Some would argue a media pc should be discrete. And this box clearly is. When my flatmate's girlfriend asked if we could watch a DVD, it took her a good while to work out the box was the DVD player. The lack of an eject button doesn't give away anything, but it's easy enough to eject from a desktop shortcut. I'm also looking to setup a shortcut key for the wireless keyboard/mouse combo.






Moving on, my next project will be for my desktop pc, merging one and a half Lian Li pc-60s together to make a case with enough room for a triple and a dual radiator. It'll be plated in white perspex for styling, but using the two cases as a base should be a lot more practical than 'the box'.



I won the first case on ebay yestarday, so things should get rolling soon!

Until then, keep on truckin!

 

Nice box you got there looking good...

Good luck with your next project