Hello all, its been awhile since I had a log but figured its about time to start another project. As you may or may not remember I did a full standing arcade for mame emulation. This is another project along the same lines but much, much smaller The basic idea is to create an all in one console. I'm going to use a frontend (gameex) to have the console pop up to a menu system that will have different options... MAME SNes Nes Genesis N64 etc.... etc... So I can pile all my old favorite games together. So... I've had a few gx260,270,280's at different job's I've had and always thought they looked a bit like an xbox 360. The plan is rough so far but heres the basics. I'm taking out the dvd and floppy drive and shoehorning in two large sata hard drives. It only has connections for 1 ide so the plan is to use a slim raid card to get two sata in raid. I also have a tiny 1.8" solid state disk I'm going to use as the boot drive to boot it as fast as possible (like I said its supposed to be a console) I'm installing a slim D2400 PRO 256MB PCIE GDDR2 Video Card for dvi and hdmi out and for some older pc games i might want For controllers I want to use two elite xbox 360 controllers. They are wireless with the pc dongle and will match what I want to do with the console color wise, it has more than enough buttons and I'm just a big fan of them overall. There are only two fans inside the case, a squirrel cage blower on the cpu venting out back, and a small 40mm fan in the psu. I'm planning on replacing the fan in the cpu with a quieter one and maybe undervolting it and taking the grille off it. I also am going to remove some of the unneeded metal grill around the entire pc. Here is a rough photoshop of what I had in mind. I want to replace the dell logo with a vandal switch, green. I also need to find a good spot for two usb plugs for the controllers to recharge out of. I want to paint it black, same as the elite 360 with a gray two tone (gray on the lighter gray piece and the two sides) So the parts I still need help with... Any suggestions on cooling the cpu? Thinking a 1u server cooler and drilling holes in the top? Replace the squirrel cage with something similar just quieter? I cant keep the stock one, it makes quite a racket. Anyone have aesthetic suggestions? Can I put a raid card in to enable me to have sata hard drives? I also need help on how to fully disassemble this thing. I can strip it down to its bare parts but have no idea how to remove the plastic from the inner metal cage. There is no instructions in dells service manual but I need this so I can do the body work and paint on the plastic Any other suggestions at all? Thanks again guys. PS these two photos are down, my host had to backup so I lost them
Wow...gx280 SFF....those take me back. We had a ton of those monsters at the old job. My $0.02 on this project...its gonna be rough. Those little beasts DO NOT dissasemble easily and as for removing the plastics from the case? Good luck with that. There are about 900000 tabs holding it on and even if you do get it off... I love the idea, but I suspect it would be FAR easier with a different case. Now, naysaying out of the way... I suggest that you use some form of filler and bondo to smooth out the logos and perhaps some fiberglass to fill out the front. Lots of sanding and about 90 coats of paint later, it would look smooth. Depending on which model of 280 you have, it has a beastly hot P4 in it. Beyond that, dell has this lovely way of making it damn near impossible to get a non-Dell heatsync on their board. You're right, those little monsters were noise makers. I suggest replacing the fan with a quieter one, and also taking a look at the PSU fan as they were quite noisy beasts too. I would say water cool it...but shoehorning it into that little space...to hell with it...WATERCOOL IT! As per the raid card...I have no answer on that. If you can get a raid card to fit that is supported under the OS you want, it might work. I dunno if the little PSU in it would push the drives though, they ran pretty close to tolerances as is. All in all, this sounds like an awesome project and I will be watching. Im also gonna dig into my pile of old 280 and 160 SFFs and see if I can come up with anything to help. Happy modding. Edit: Just thought I would add that those lil beasts make a kickass OSX-X86 box.
Thanks for the reply! I know its going to be a nightmare to fully dissasemble, I've tried once before and failed. I figure worst case scenario is I break alot of the tabs holding the plastic and metal cage together and reattach it. The inside will be tidy but not visible. Since I didnt post it here are the specs P4 3.2ghz HT 775 160w psu (apparently fairly decent and under rated for wats) 4gig ram HD2400 PRO 256mb Your right about the hard drives and power consumption, I might have to settle with one large hard drive. I still want to try the sata card because I cant find an ide hard drive over 500mb. If I'm stuck with only one Id like it to be 1.5-2 tb. I dont really want the complication of water cooling, I plan on carting this thing around every once in awhile and doubt I would have the room anyways (room to keep it all hidden and internal anyways) I'm thinking for cooling a high end 1u server heatsink that has the one piece copper bottom and a silent fan on top. Ill just drill some vent holes like on the top of the 360 to allow cool air to come in and shroud it. I will measure and see how much room I have, I want to squeeze the largest one I can in there obviously and maybe I can go with something bigger than that. To help keep it cool I was thinking of adding a front mounted blow hole fan or trying to squeeze a fan in the rear. I know how hot these things can get and thats where the noise comes from when those fans have to ramp up. And I wouldnt have to worry as much about cooling the internals and could go passive with some things (add a northbridge passive heatsink ect) I'm getting parts now, I just got the 4gb of ram
Phew...the 3.2 eh? Those monsters ran screaming hot. I wish you luck good sir. Two things you need to take into consideration, depending on the model of mobo that 280 has. First, Dell used some shitty capacitors on earlier ones. Check if your capacitors have "X"s on top of them. If so, you need to watch them as they have a tendency to burst if they get too hot. If you have "K"s, you're probably ok. Second, those 160w PSUs can be pushed to deliver more power then they are rated for, but they will burn out fast. Dell did a disservice to businesses with these boxes by using lots of inferior components (what else is new right?) and their lives were drastically shortened unless they were kept spic-and-span clean and running in environments with plenty of airflow. I can't tell you the number of these that we tossed because they were running under a desk and overheated and blew themselves up. Good luck sir. I will watch for results.
i reckon go for the x360 look go the black pro/elite model look, easy to do, just make sure you use jbweld on the joins with proper plastic and then patch up the front, make it a smooth finish and it'll be nice or matt black it out yeah the 160w PSUs are rated that at their lowest level and can go upto 200w, but, they are very prone to failure as said above. I've got a few spares, but I'm in NZ You might also want to check the SATA ports on the motherboard, I know you mentioned a SATA controller above, but yeah the SATA ports on the mobo do support raid I think, all two of them :S Also check the caps, any signs of a leaking/bad one and seriously, biff the board and go mini ITX
Thanks for the comments guys! I'm well aware of the leaky capaictor issue, *******s I'm also going to have this out in the open with no airflow issues. I'm doing my best to keep the power supply happy, I'm going to clean it out very well and replace the fan cooling it with a much better one. I have never modified a psu before (well besides sleeving ect) and wonder how much I would gain by putting a better heatsink inside of it? I plan on cooling the p4 with the best heatsink I can fit, I'm going to trim the metal cage on the inside and drill holes in the top to cool it directly from outside air. I'm actually considering a blowhole up front blowing directly on it as well... kind of a two pronged attack lol. I'm going to put some larger case feet on it also and was considering venting underneath the motherboard as well. I'm hoping with the proper fans (specifically quite ones) I can keep the noise manageable. I would go with a mini itx system but I have 20 of these suckers floating around and if it all works out these are going to be christmas presents. Buying other components justs adds a cost I dont need if this works. If it fails miserably Ill go that route for myself. Still waiting on parts and materials to be delivered to start modding. I did get two elite 360 controllers. I'm going to try and match that paint, krylon makes a textured paint, need to experiment a bit with that.
ok, offical project log now woot! If a mod sees this can you move it? Anyways, I finally got the gx280 home and started on it... this one was rougher than I remember oh well... In all its glory! This is my work area fyi, not alot of room for modding but its small so its ok lol Lets crack this sucker open! You can see the horrible cpu fan and the general clutter of a pc this small Ok, this is what I'm thinking for the cpu heatsink. The factory one is still copper with a heatpipe and apparently worked ok enough for them to put in a billion of these things so I'm keeping it, I'm going to put an 80mm fan on top to get rid of all that noise. This is just a mock up with an extra I had lying around, have a pwm on order First stumbling block I've hit, dell proprietary bs... 5pin cpu fan with 4 wires?! wtf. With my friend google I found out if you try and bypass this sucker the bios will flip its lid, no way to disable it. So I have to make/buy an adapter for that... yay Ok case completely gutted on the inside, actually was very easy and made more sense than alot of full size tower cases I've used
Sooo the psu is probably going to be my weak point, so I'm replacing the stock crappy fan with the best aftermarket one I can find... its on order. I pulled the grill off as well First things first, I cracked this sucker open... seeing if there was anything I could do to increase its lifespan, also you have to open it to get to the fan anyways. Not to mention it needing a good cleaning. After some heavy dissasembly I notice they are using the outside of the case as a heatsink, held together with some crappy thermal adhesive, the was about an 1/8" gap between the heatsink and the case as well.. Sooo I cleaned off all that gunk and replaced it with some trusty artic5. I also rebent the heatsink so its right up against the case as much as it can be and used the screw to really pull them together.. In these pictures you can see the artic5 I still have to wait for the fan and the molex/atx pin remover to assemble it, I'm going to fully sleeve it as well.
ok, removing the plastic from the internal metal cage was a nightmare... but I figured out a trick that Ill share for the archives of google... Removing a gx280 plastic casing I used some old credit cards I canceled that I keep around (perfect for spreading antec5). There is four clips that you have to pull out on the sides of the case and two at the front, impossible unless you have 7 hands. So... I slid a credit card under each of the 4 clips to separate them from the case and used a screwdriver for the top two.. it popped right off! The bottom and the two sides were all very easy, that was the only part that was a nightmare.
Ok, time for some plastic modding! Like I said the case is rough, the bottom was cracked in two parts sooo some miracle sauce to the rescue! This stuff worked like magic, the plastic is as strong as the rest of the panel now
Soo I need a vent above the cpu to pull cold air in when I replace the fan, since nothing will set on top of this its not an issue. I was considering a fan grill but thought it would look bolted on and want to stick with a factory look... so that means I get to break out the drill! I masked off where I wanted the grill and then taped some graph paper I made and printed out really quick Take a center punch, a drill and an hour of my life and viola! I think it came out good, the black behind it is a car and something else, it was hard to take a picture of but needless to say it looks factory to me Also, notice the L missing. Those suckers are pressed in lol, go figure I also prepped the bottom of the case by sanding off the feet. I have some nice rubber ones to reduce vibration and the stock hard plastic ones had to go
Looking good man. Keep up the good work. Im going to have to remember that "credit card trick" when I tear into my old stock of those beasties and try and figure out what to do with them.
Yeah good start there, love your style of writing an update, very catchy Some really weird solutions by Dell (the letters in the side, the crappy thermal paste). But since you will probably find better solutions for them, I'm convinced it will come out OK. One question, what car is that out of curiousity? I'm from euroland so we don't see those typical american beasts around much. Keep it up!
Thanks guys, I've been working all week so progress has been slow BUT I am in bondo... yay I found some really cool "wrinkle" semi gloss stuff for paint. It does a slight wrinkle sort of like abs plastic, I really liked it on the few test pieces I tried. I tried to take a few pictures but its nearly impossible to get them. It will also help to hide any small bondo mishaps that I might see with a gloss black. I also got the last of the parts orders in. For a small mod I have an amazing amount of boxes haha. Once all the painting is done the rest of the assembly should be finished in one update, depending on if there is any interest Ill continue to update on the software end since there are quite a few tweaks and custom software solutions needed to pull this off. Thats up in the air though since I know emulation mods aren't that popular. aevitas- its a 1972 camaro z/28... well it started out that way before the modding bug took over that part of my life as well Its completely illegal, virtually undriveable on public streets and quite likely a death trap... but I love it
HOLY CRAP nice camaro, And as far as the modding, witch i almost completely forgot about after seeing that beast. the dell cases are a lot of fun once you figure them out. they just drive me crazy with the green tabs here and there I've been wanting to do an "all in one classic system" and i have a spare gx270sff motherboard sitting around, So I'll be following this. looking good so far, best of luck.
ok, quick update on the software end and a bit of background for anyone not to familiar with emulation. First off there are separate emulators for each device you want to emulate (one snes emulator, one nes, one N46, one sega genesis ect.). As you can imagine messing with a dozen or two emulators with different interfaces, appearances, settings ect can be annoying. So people use whats called a "frontend" this is a gui interface that "usually" seamlessly stiches all these together. If you've ever seen one of those cheap all in one systems at an electronics store (the joystick that plays old atari games) the interface that lets you pick games is a crappy frontend. This is the one I've chosen for mine, just to give you guys an idea of how cool this stuff can be Awesome right? Now this is just the front end. For each piece of software you put on there you add untold hours to tweaking ect. For each single emulator you have to groom the roms, get snapshots of each one, videos of each one, control panel layouts, flyers, cabinet pictures, set the image for your monitor, set the controls up, set drivers up and basically tweak the crap out of it.... x2 dozen.... As you can see the software end is borderline overwhelming and takes longer than the hardware mod portion. The idea is to have a total console experience. You hit the power button and you skip any visuals that lead you to believe its a PC. No bios loading, no boot screen, no windows logo's, no desktop ect... It loads instantly into this frontend and is unable to exit. Hope you think the video is as cool as I do
