Zaubertuba
100+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2009
- Posts
- 449
- Likes
- 23
I wanted a nice-looking component-sized case for my Media PC source, and everything out there seemed, well, huge. And metal.
So I built my own:
Even with a Micro-ATX motherboard, it still was a challenge to make things compact. Not a lot of wasted space here:
SSD (visible in the picture above on it's side next to the chassis fan) is for operating system only. Room for one 2 TB HDD under the DVD (later to become Blu-Ray) drive.
I already had the HDD and DVD drives, the quiet Seasonic power supply, CPU and chassis fans, passive-cooled NVidia card (which I had to adjust to fit the short height) and memory. Bought the motherboard (Gigabyte 880GM-USB3) and CPU for a song from the local electronics recycling shop.
Drive cage sourced from an old Dell case. The base pan and rear panel I adapted from a dead DVD-changer. The top cover I cut down from yet another old case. Oak panels came from an old fish tank hood.
You can see the power switch wire on the left side of the case running to the back. I wanted to keep the front clean, so I set up my OS (Linux Mint 19.2 - XFCE Edition) to go to sleep with a hotkey and wake with any key from a compact wireless media keyboard. I've run linux distros for weeks on end without rebooting so I figure I shouldn't run into any problems.
Linux is open-source (as in, free beer), and I'm running Kodi 18 for my media software. So, the total cost of the build, including a new SSD, came in at under $100.
So I built my own:
Even with a Micro-ATX motherboard, it still was a challenge to make things compact. Not a lot of wasted space here:
SSD (visible in the picture above on it's side next to the chassis fan) is for operating system only. Room for one 2 TB HDD under the DVD (later to become Blu-Ray) drive.
I already had the HDD and DVD drives, the quiet Seasonic power supply, CPU and chassis fans, passive-cooled NVidia card (which I had to adjust to fit the short height) and memory. Bought the motherboard (Gigabyte 880GM-USB3) and CPU for a song from the local electronics recycling shop.
Drive cage sourced from an old Dell case. The base pan and rear panel I adapted from a dead DVD-changer. The top cover I cut down from yet another old case. Oak panels came from an old fish tank hood.
You can see the power switch wire on the left side of the case running to the back. I wanted to keep the front clean, so I set up my OS (Linux Mint 19.2 - XFCE Edition) to go to sleep with a hotkey and wake with any key from a compact wireless media keyboard. I've run linux distros for weeks on end without rebooting so I figure I shouldn't run into any problems.
Linux is open-source (as in, free beer), and I'm running Kodi 18 for my media software. So, the total cost of the build, including a new SSD, came in at under $100.
