Project: Frame Box Media Center

[TheGreatSatan]

I've had this box with glass on the front for a couple of years now and I've always wanted to make a computer out of it. The problem is: I've never had a reason. That has changed. I would like to have a basic Media Center down in my modding area for when I'm modding and want to hear music or glance at TBCS inbetween cuts.

I also have this Intel Atom 330/Mini ITX combo that would be perfect for such a mudane task as playing music

I removed the shelves with a hammer

And put in the board

Then I cut the holes for the motherboard and PSU

I'll have 2GB of RAM and an 80GB Seagate hard drive too. I'm still not sure how I'm going to mount the drive though

I'm going to be adding this to my wall of motherboards

Like this

[billygoat333]

gonna look sick up there among your MBs! lol what you gonna do for speakers? would be cool to make a circuit board covered speaker box to put up there!

[DonT-FeaR]

looking good mate!

[TheGreatSatan]

gonna look sick up there among your MBs! lol what you gonna do for speakers? would be cool to make a circuit board covered speaker box to put up there!

If I knew how

[billygoat333]

what I would do would be to make a box outta wood and then just glue circuit board to it. or bolt it to it, whatever floats your boat. you could just do that to pre existing speakers as well...

[Luke122]

I'd put a couple of exhaust fans at the top of that thing too.

As for mounting the hdd, do you mean positioning is giving you grief, or the mechanical solution?

[Mark_Hardware]

Looks cool, man. Very neat idea. Nice wall! Wish I had a wall like that!!

[TheGreatSatan]

I'd put a couple of exhaust fans at the top of that thing too.

As for mounting the hdd, do you mean positioning is giving you grief, or the mechanical solution?

Positioning. I think I'll just drill in an old HD cage and then slide the drive in. I think I may remove the glass frame part and replace it with this:

[SXRguyinMA]

nice idea TGS!

as far as HDD Mounting, look into these puppies I used in this thread. I used them to mount my drain valve for my LCS, but the pins fit right into the screw hols on the HDD, and they may work just how you need, and they're cheap enough

[TheGreatSatan]

I had this old hard drive cage laying around

So I cut it for this project

And then just drilled the hard drive into place

As you can see I removed the glass frame

I'll be using this instead. It was the cover to El Diablo that I did years ago

I got it all connected and booted into the BIOS

There's a single screw holding the box into place at the top

And two braces at the bottom

I temporarily connected a DVD drive to the board to install Windows. If I need to use one in the future I have an external one

I LOVE Vista, but went with XP because it's just going to be for Media. A dual Core Atom and 2GB of RAM should fly. It will not be on a network or connected to the internet. I won't need anti-virus or a firewall of any kind either. The less, the better, the faster

Next, I'll be working on lighting, exhausting, and mounting the LCD