I'm going to build myself a new PC. It'll be an Athlon 1GHz on an ABIT KT7-RAID. It'll have 4 IBM 75GXP drives in it. It'll have a hot graphics card in it, maybe two. There'll be network, audio, SCSI as well. Quite a full-featured system.
And I want to put it in a small case. My trusty old Pentium box, still running OK as a wee Linux server under the desk, has an AT case 13" tall and 5.5" wide, but it has a DAT (it backs up my home network), a CD, ZIP, floppy and 3 hard drives, and a stack of cards.
My slightly newer K6-3 system, ATX based, 14" tall and 6.5" wide, is crap; the PSU is positioned over the northeast corner of the board, so has poor cooling, and there's only one internal 3.5" bay.
Problem is, everything I'm looking at is fairly big -- haven't seen one less than 17" tall or 6.5" wide -- and without becoming monstrously large, they only have one or two internal bays, and/or poor cooling, usually together with large ugly plastic mouldings sticking out all over the place.
Is it too much to ask for a case 2" taller than the ATX board (the 2" for the PSU to slot in), 5.5" wide, with case fans mounting over the northwest corner and in the front, 2 or 3 5.25" external bays, 2 3.5" external bays, and 4 or 5 internal 3.5" bays? My arithmetic says if you sacrifice full-length PCI cards, it would fit. Is there anyone making such a thing? Or is all the expertise going into 1U-high server cases, which pack dual-processor dual- or triple- hot swap bays and all that?
OK, thinking about it, if you only fit 2 5.25" bays right at the top, fronting on from the PSU, if you fitted front vents on the motherboard side directly underneath, you can get front-to-back cool-air drawn across your memory and CPU by the rear case fan, and the lower front case fan blows cool air over the stack of hard drives. I did the ASCII-art but of course being HTMLized it lost the formatting.
Anyway, I guess I just had to get that off my chest.
By the way I'm in the UK so if you've any tips for suppliers here that would be cool too!
Cheers,
John.
And I want to put it in a small case. My trusty old Pentium box, still running OK as a wee Linux server under the desk, has an AT case 13" tall and 5.5" wide, but it has a DAT (it backs up my home network), a CD, ZIP, floppy and 3 hard drives, and a stack of cards.
My slightly newer K6-3 system, ATX based, 14" tall and 6.5" wide, is crap; the PSU is positioned over the northeast corner of the board, so has poor cooling, and there's only one internal 3.5" bay.
Problem is, everything I'm looking at is fairly big -- haven't seen one less than 17" tall or 6.5" wide -- and without becoming monstrously large, they only have one or two internal bays, and/or poor cooling, usually together with large ugly plastic mouldings sticking out all over the place.
Is it too much to ask for a case 2" taller than the ATX board (the 2" for the PSU to slot in), 5.5" wide, with case fans mounting over the northwest corner and in the front, 2 or 3 5.25" external bays, 2 3.5" external bays, and 4 or 5 internal 3.5" bays? My arithmetic says if you sacrifice full-length PCI cards, it would fit. Is there anyone making such a thing? Or is all the expertise going into 1U-high server cases, which pack dual-processor dual- or triple- hot swap bays and all that?
OK, thinking about it, if you only fit 2 5.25" bays right at the top, fronting on from the PSU, if you fitted front vents on the motherboard side directly underneath, you can get front-to-back cool-air drawn across your memory and CPU by the rear case fan, and the lower front case fan blows cool air over the stack of hard drives. I did the ASCII-art but of course being HTMLized it lost the formatting.
Anyway, I guess I just had to get that off my chest.
By the way I'm in the UK so if you've any tips for suppliers here that would be cool too!
Cheers,
John.
Facebook
Twitter