Several Questions for building a Crazy Overclocking Case

[GroundOO]

No so much a mod because I'm building it from scratch. Noise means nothing, this will be in my basement, CFM is everything! I've been dreaming of something like this for a while now and finally figured out how to implement it. I'll get pics up when I can.

OK, I start with a 2' by 2' 7" box (internally about 8" height) made of wood, originally used to hold some kind of power-plant parts (like turbine blades or something.) I'm attaching a window-mounting exhaust fan on top that is about 2' by 2'. The bottom part is raised, here's an attempt at a drawing....

......___________
../OOOOfanOOOO\
/-----------------------------\ <--lid will be hinged on.
|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|
|xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|
__________________
__II____________II__


ok that kind of sucks but basically metal posts (the II's) connect 2 boards, this is the base. the '.'s are just for spacing

so I'm gonna cut a hole in the board that forms the bottom of the box so the air will effectively flow in through the fan, out the hole and sideways out the space in the bottom. Finally I'm going to disperse the parts of the system throughout in a patern I've already worked out, might as well make a picture for it:

___________________
|empty_________power|
|empt|..holehole..|suply|
|empt\..holehole..|suply|
|empty\.holehole./HDD.|
|^^^^^^^^\|...hole..|..rack.|
|mother/|...hole..|empty|
|board\..|______|...CD..|
|_____/_flopy___ROM_|
...........................|
..........................\/


Out of the front: CDROMs will be mounted vertically (open up) and slide out in a cabinet thing. The floppy will tip out on a hinge (hinged at the bottom, open up.) HDDs will be in a 3.5&quot; holder taken out of a case and seated in a base. The power supply will have it's cover taken off and replaced by a metal grate (so it has airflow and is still protected.) I'll drill custom holes for the mobo screws. Empty space is for water pump or something.

Pretty crazy stuff, I'll probably eventually have a 72W peltier + water cooling setup. I'm thinking about lining the bottom-outlet with fans to increase the output (and so the air knows where to go!) I hope my explanations haven't been too befuddling, now to the actual substance of this note...

QUesTIon-s

1. Can I get a power supply with longer cables--specifically the 4-pin cables--or will I need extensions for them? Do most higher-end ones have longer cables?

2. Can I mount hard drives vertically(short end straight up)? The HDD I have now is an older 8.4Gig but I'm getting IBM deskstars.

3. On the same note can I mount CD(&amp;DVD) drives vertically, as in with the tray opening upwards? Would I have to use those little clips on the tray all the time? What if I had slot loaders?

4. Can anybody think why any of this would be a bad idea?

5. Processor suggestions? I'm going AMD don't question that, I'll probably wait and see what people do with .9-1.2 GHz Thunderbirds as far as overclocking goes. And see when >12.5x multipliers come out. I guess I could mod that too....


That's all for now, thanks alot, this isn't the last you'll be seing of me I'm sure. (General comments are welcome btw)

 

[Rendus]

1. Can I get a power supply with longer cables--specifically the 4-pin cables--or will I need extensions for them? Do most higher-end ones have longer cables?

I have an Antec KS188 with the 300 watt power supply, and the power cables easily reach the bottom of the case if I let them dangle. Length of the cables should be fine.

2. Can I mount hard drives vertically(short end straight up)? The HDD I have now is an older 8.4Gig but I'm getting IBM deskstars.

Any modern hard drive can run at pretty much any angle. I do tech support for Dell, and they've been mounting the HDs vertically for at least 5 years now, including with Deskstars (and even Cheetahs from what I've seen). Shouldn't be an issue.

3. On the same note can I mount CD(&amp;DVD) drives vertically, as in with the tray opening upwards? Would I have to use those little clips on the tray all the time? What if I had slot loaders?

This one's a bit more touchy, as the disk may slip inside the drive itself without the tabs (or if you accidentally drop it into the opening). Slot loaders should work fine (Witness the Apple cube), and I guess tray loaders should work OK, but I'm not certain on that.

4. Can anybody think why any of this would be a bad idea?

Er. Not really

5. Processor suggestions? I'm going AMD don't question that, I'll probably wait and see what people do with .9-1.2 GHz Thunderbirds as far as overclocking goes. And see when >12.5x multipliers come out. I guess I could mod that too....

Well, personally I have a 900Mhz Thunderbird, and if I could get the pencil trick to work (I'm picking up a window defogger repair kit when I get paid) I'd probably easily end up with 1.1 or so. (FSB overclocking lets me into Windows at 1 gig, lets me run the distributed.net client all I want (mmm... 3.5mkeys/sec), but as soon as I start something memory intensive, I get lockups, so it seems the limiting factor on my chip is the touchy FSB of the Athlon chipsets). I really wouldn't fork out for the premium the 1.0+ chips go for.

 

[jblondi]

I can see a very possible problem. Wood is not conductive, therefore....the case wont be grounded. You might want to ground each individual part in that case (No pun intended). I know that cases now are built to some sort of electrical spec. You might want to check up on that before you build a wood beast that fries your components. The other problem is heat, wood will burn. Maybe not after a few minutes, but a few hours of heating the wood could cause some smouldering or other problems. Ive heard of a few other members that used plexi glass for their case construction. Maybe that would be a better alternative for your case. Then you could watch the thing burn. Good luck.

 

[Imaginer]

Ahem.

you can use wood and nothing would burn in a sense. Just keep the components off the wood.

As for the motherboard, there is already a ground in the ATX connector. The standoffs are another measure taken. My motherboard tray is plexiglass mounted on wood. The board is on the plexiglass.

I been running my computer in a wood case with no problems. Though, it is a Pentium 2. There would be no fire unless you actually try and make sparks fly which would unlikely happen. The only heat is the air which would make the temperature hot but not enough to destroy anything.

If you want, go plexi. If grounding is an issue, insulate the insides with aluminum or something like that. And if you do build a case out of wood, give it a good finish.

Sounds like your idea is ok. Though, I prefer to mount hard drives flat instead and also the Cd drives too.

 

[GroundOO]

Thanks for your help, I'll probably add something like plexiglass between the mobo and the wood. I'll probably space everything from the wood will plastic (or plexiglass/ceramic?) washers. I'm considering grounding stuff to the power supply, just in case. The hard drives will most likely be horizontal, the way I'm starting to put things together. I'm trying to find a way to make the CDs horizontal and still make it look spiffy. Anybody know if the 12x10x Plexwriter has a slot version? I know the Pioneer DVD does.

Chris