Deco-ITX Well guys n gals its time for another of my lil projects! Fresh from my Biscuit Tin Speaker exploits a few months back I'm now approaching something a little bit bigger. As the title gives suggestion, I'm going to be building a Deco style ITX case for my Epia board. It only gets used as my emergency spare workstation, rarely being turned on, so it should have a nice enclosure so its not ugly to look at while its collecting dust What's going in it? Epia CL-10000 - review: http://www.pcreview.co.uk/reviews/Motherboards/VIA_Epia-CL_10000/ 1gb ram 20gb Maxtor D540X - this is a single 20gb platter drive so its about 2/3 the usual height of a hard drive Either a Shuttle 250W PSU or a 90W one I have if its got enough juice I may elect to turn this into a xvid player, so I'll put in one of the PCI GF4 MXs I have laying around into this for TV out if so Akasa 120mm Amber fan Amber cold cathodes, 10cm, as this will be a small case! Zalman northbridge passive heatsink to replace the whiny 40mm hsf POSSIBLY a cdrom or dvdrom; it doesn't really need one What's it gonna look like? I found this while using Google Image Search and The grill on the front will have the fan behind it. The CL-10000 does need an active fan on it so I'm going to have the Akasa 120mm Amber fan blowing air through the case over the heatsinks. I'm going to put a larger heatsink over the cpu, the Zalman northbridge passive heatsink. It won't quite run passive but with this I should only have to run the amber fan at 5v. The amber fans are very quiet anyway, and at 5v it won't be noticeable compared to the psu. Speaking of PSUs, I'm possibly going to remove the cover from the PSU and duct the 120mm fan partially so I can remove the fan in the PSU. I need to check the noise levels as I want this to be quiet as I can. I'll either use a shuttle 250W PSU, or I have a 90W PSU from an earlier mod. I think the 90W PSU would have enough juice for the ITX and a hard drive (it was powering similar), but I'm not sure it'd run the cathode and the fan as well. The amps on it are very tight. I'll do some testing and use the quietest one What are you making it of? Tomorrow I'm going to visit a reclaimed wood project here in Bristol. I would rather make this out of something nice like Cherry for the natural grain etc but I'm doing this essentially on a shoestring budget so I'll use what I can get! It may end up being Pine, in which case I'll be coating it very thickly with lacquer and putting a Deco veneer style finish to it. Either way the colour should be close to the picture above. Get your arse in gear! Alright alright chill out! Some component piccies
hm.. i'll w8 for some more pics to say more.. i guess it will be a nice mod to carry to LAN's and so forth.. good luck! regards
It won't really be fast enough for anything useful at a LAN, except for as a fileserver perhaps I have a rock gaming laptop which I take to LANs anyway I'm going to either fit one of these and three sata hard drives, or two normal IDE caddies. If I fit sata hard drives, I'll have to put in a sata PCI controller, and buy a sata hard drive as I have IDE only, which means no TV-out PCI graphics card. That will be OK though as I'll be getting a HD LCD TV later in the year so I can just use a DVI <> analogue adaptor! In other words, this is now a Deco-ITX fileserver It'll be low power consumption but with the possibility of three hard drives going in, I'll be utilising the shuttle psu Edit: Tonight I'm going to play with Alibre Design Xpress or the google free Sketchup and of course you lucky lucky people are going to get some piccies to give you a better idea of intention
Try ebay for a radio case, I picked up this nice little one for my own Bakelite project in the future, a 1949 Truetone. Curious to see where you go with this
