I'm relatively new to the whole SFF custom scene and just recently joined. In my Intro thread I mentioned that back in 2011 I had built a SFF pc somewhat inadvertently, before I knew SFF was a thing. I crammed a Zotac FUSION350-A-E board, a couple SODIMMS, a cheap Mini ITX psu, and a couple 2.5" drives into an old external CD drive case because why not. Some of the mods asked for pics, so here they are.
The CD Drive case:
So the case started out life as one of these, a Creative Labs CT2755 EasyCD external drive, which would hook up to the SoundBlaster 16 companion card installed in the pc.
Stock case (not my pics, I put this together before I knew pc build logs were a thing.)
VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: 9 years ago I was not the master craftsman I am today, and the only modding tools I had available then were a cheap 6V drill, a glue gun and a snap-off razor knife. There's lots of paint scuffing from it living in a box of loose parts in a closet for the last 6+ years. And I knew nothing about proper case airflow requirements back then.
The original front panel had a rotary volume control and microphone and headphone jacks. The volume wheel was removed and a power switch (fabbed up out of the end of a tongue depressor sharpied black and superglued to a scavenged momentary switch) was installed in it's place. The microphone/headphone jacks were filled with led's embedded in hot glue, which served as power/hdd activity indicators. A scrap piece of acrylic with hand carved edges went in where the original CD drive bezel once was. With a bit of crimping of the edges the I/O shield fit snugly where the original did, and a second, tiny acrylic window was fit to fill in the gap and hold the power connector.
The new guts aren't anything special, the afore mentioned Zotac board, memory, psu and drives. It was really wasn't meant to be anything more than a streaming box. The passively cooled 1.6 GHz dual core AMD E350 APU had embedded Radeon HD 6310 graphics so no dedicated GPU was needed, which is good because the AOKPOWER psu only supplied 140W. The two SODIMM slots were filled to the max with 8GB of Crucial DDR3 memory. When first assembled it had two 2.5" 250GB WD Scorpio HDDs (which eventually died) mounted in a custom bracket behind the front window, in it's current iteration (recently resurrected and struggling along as my son's Minecraft server), it has one 128GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD mounted directly to the bottom of the case. Everything is held in place using #6 machine screws attached through the bottom of the case, with #6 nuts as standoffs. Cable management could have been better, but I'm not sure if custom length, individually sleeved cables were a thing back then. Besides, it all fit and was barely visible anyway, so it was good enough for me. Ventilation was non-existent, but it never got very hot. Sadly, there was no RGB lighting, only RG (a red motherboard power indicator and the green HDD lights).
The case's internal dimensions are 200x275x50, which basically makes this a 2.75L case. With modern components' lower power demands, low profile cooling solutions and more powerful PSUs and GPUs available in smaller packages, I might just see if I can shovel some more up to date hardware into this and breathe new life into it. Anyone know of a decent GPU that will fit in a less than 200x100x50mm space?
The CD Drive case:
So the case started out life as one of these, a Creative Labs CT2755 EasyCD external drive, which would hook up to the SoundBlaster 16 companion card installed in the pc.
Stock case (not my pics, I put this together before I knew pc build logs were a thing.)
VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED: 9 years ago I was not the master craftsman I am today, and the only modding tools I had available then were a cheap 6V drill, a glue gun and a snap-off razor knife. There's lots of paint scuffing from it living in a box of loose parts in a closet for the last 6+ years. And I knew nothing about proper case airflow requirements back then.
The original front panel had a rotary volume control and microphone and headphone jacks. The volume wheel was removed and a power switch (fabbed up out of the end of a tongue depressor sharpied black and superglued to a scavenged momentary switch) was installed in it's place. The microphone/headphone jacks were filled with led's embedded in hot glue, which served as power/hdd activity indicators. A scrap piece of acrylic with hand carved edges went in where the original CD drive bezel once was. With a bit of crimping of the edges the I/O shield fit snugly where the original did, and a second, tiny acrylic window was fit to fill in the gap and hold the power connector.
The new guts aren't anything special, the afore mentioned Zotac board, memory, psu and drives. It was really wasn't meant to be anything more than a streaming box. The passively cooled 1.6 GHz dual core AMD E350 APU had embedded Radeon HD 6310 graphics so no dedicated GPU was needed, which is good because the AOKPOWER psu only supplied 140W. The two SODIMM slots were filled to the max with 8GB of Crucial DDR3 memory. When first assembled it had two 2.5" 250GB WD Scorpio HDDs (which eventually died) mounted in a custom bracket behind the front window, in it's current iteration (recently resurrected and struggling along as my son's Minecraft server), it has one 128GB Samsung 850 Pro SSD mounted directly to the bottom of the case. Everything is held in place using #6 machine screws attached through the bottom of the case, with #6 nuts as standoffs. Cable management could have been better, but I'm not sure if custom length, individually sleeved cables were a thing back then. Besides, it all fit and was barely visible anyway, so it was good enough for me. Ventilation was non-existent, but it never got very hot. Sadly, there was no RGB lighting, only RG (a red motherboard power indicator and the green HDD lights).
The case's internal dimensions are 200x275x50, which basically makes this a 2.75L case. With modern components' lower power demands, low profile cooling solutions and more powerful PSUs and GPUs available in smaller packages, I might just see if I can shovel some more up to date hardware into this and breathe new life into it. Anyone know of a decent GPU that will fit in a less than 200x100x50mm space?
