At this point, I'm only looking to gauge interest in the case, and nothing about the case is set in stone.
With that out of the way....
I present to you, The Gnome, a budget HTPC case for Thin Mini ITX chassis.
Right now, my current computer chassis has a lot of wasted space that I figured I could get rid of. It has space for the motherboard, a single slot low profile expansion card, 2x 3.5" hard drives, 1x 2.5" hard drive, and a Blu Ray drive and more room to spare for fans. Seeing as how I don't really need all that space, I designed a chassis to get rid of as much of the unused space as I could and make a truly small chassis while retaining swapability of components.
The chassis has enough room for a thin mini ITX motherboard, a single low profile expansion card, a 2.5" HDD/SSD, and 1 60mm fan (2 fans if you use an mSata/mPCIe based storage drive). It is not intended to be used as a gaming machine, only low powered applications, so a 120W external power brick should be more than enough if you're using a 35 W TDP CPU.
If you take a look at the 3rd picture in the album, you can see how everything fits together. The bottom 60mm fan mount has 4 mounting screws around it. This is if you choose to use that space for an HDD/SSD. The graphics card/capture card will sit above the hard drive/fans. A riser of your choosing will be necessary.
I have designed this using Protocase Designer, specifically with the "extruded chassis" option. This significantly reduces the cost of the chassis. I have not factored in the cost of the power button, and I have left the surface of the chassis as "unfinished" (to further reduce costs), but as it stands, an order of 5 units will be $70/ea and 10 units will be $60/ea, excl tax and shipping.
With that out of the way....
I present to you, The Gnome, a budget HTPC case for Thin Mini ITX chassis.
Right now, my current computer chassis has a lot of wasted space that I figured I could get rid of. It has space for the motherboard, a single slot low profile expansion card, 2x 3.5" hard drives, 1x 2.5" hard drive, and a Blu Ray drive and more room to spare for fans. Seeing as how I don't really need all that space, I designed a chassis to get rid of as much of the unused space as I could and make a truly small chassis while retaining swapability of components.
The chassis has enough room for a thin mini ITX motherboard, a single low profile expansion card, a 2.5" HDD/SSD, and 1 60mm fan (2 fans if you use an mSata/mPCIe based storage drive). It is not intended to be used as a gaming machine, only low powered applications, so a 120W external power brick should be more than enough if you're using a 35 W TDP CPU.
If you take a look at the 3rd picture in the album, you can see how everything fits together. The bottom 60mm fan mount has 4 mounting screws around it. This is if you choose to use that space for an HDD/SSD. The graphics card/capture card will sit above the hard drive/fans. A riser of your choosing will be necessary.
I have designed this using Protocase Designer, specifically with the "extruded chassis" option. This significantly reduces the cost of the chassis. I have not factored in the cost of the power button, and I have left the surface of the chassis as "unfinished" (to further reduce costs), but as it stands, an order of 5 units will be $70/ea and 10 units will be $60/ea, excl tax and shipping.
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