Freevo Pictures
Before powering on
Building. The parts arrive... left to right: the PW-200-M power build, PCI riser card, (useless) Coby power supply, EPIA ME-6000 mainboard, the PVR-350 PCI card, and 512MB of RAM.
the parts, assembled:
(note the little piece of cardboard keeping the PVR-350 PCI card from flopping onto the mainboard in this pic):
Powering on for the first time
The board fully assembled and functional. Things to note in this pic --
- it's sitting on top of the ATX case (with a newspaper insulator layer), and hooked up to ATX power supply etc.
Note the red arrow pointing at the jumper for the essential ATX power switch -- you're going to need one of those to power-on the board. That's annoying.
- The blue thing is the Gigafast USB wifi dongle.
- a PC keyboard and VGA monitor are also hooked up for this early stage of the process.
The case
Here's what the base of the case looks like. Note the following:
- the front fascia of the Exabyte tape drive, now detached from the drive and stuck in place with lots of silicone glue
- the LED cable running from said front fascia; of course, the LED itself is glued into place behind its little window
- some haphazardly-drilled holes in the base, for ventilation (cold air enters through these)
- the four mainboard standoff screws. Each is held in place with -- guess! -- plentiful silicone glue. I love silicone glue.
- a piece of the original RF shielding, left in place to provide a flat base for one of the mainboard's standoffs, and because it looks cool
the two biro caps that hold the hard disk in place at a diagonal angle
The innards of the Exabyte 8500 tape drive that came out of that case. The power supply is a 60W and may even be reusable!
Two pictures of the case, with parts installed. Note the CPU heatsink just under the hard drive -- unfortunately this is the only place it fits.
In the back-right corner is the extractor fan, and up front (at the bottom of the first pic) there are the drilled holes. The IDE cable is folded to maximise airflow between the holes, the CPU, and the fan. Every little helps The second pic doesn't have the cable folded yet, and you can see it would definitely block the airflow otherwise.
Finally, the completed box -- pretty clean-looking, despite all my hacking inside it I'm considering putting an LED panel in the window, but that's a TODO.