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Ifmu's Build-a-Computer Project
Well hello all once again. My apologies since the last update, but I've been bustin' my behind working and all, so I haven't been able to get the cases and all that... until now!! :)
But any-who what I've decided to do here was a little outta the ordinary, but then again isn't all of this? Basically, to make a long story short, there's a guy I've been talking with online and he sent me some pics of his setup, and well, I thought it was just too sweet. At first I was planning on going with a full tower case, but do to the difficulties I've had and after seeing his case, I've decided to do something a little more different here. So my plan is to take 2 mid-tower cases and add them to one another side by side. What I am going to do is place the power supplies (yes dual PSU's, I'll explain more later on this) with the CD-ROM's and CD burners and all that, and even the water cooling (hopefully inline) pump on one side, with the motherboard and the hard drives on the other side--less obstacles in the path of the air blowing over the motherboard. Not only will this make the air flow easier it will also make updating with newer components a lot easier as well--less cables to get in the way.
Well here's the starting point for this little step here, as you can see with the pic I have below the case is a standard ATX mid-tower case; basic as you can get. I tried to get the most squared off that I could but I wasn't the one buying the cases. (A friend who can get parts wholesale! Both mid-tower cases and one full tower case cost me a big 50 bucks...) But he knew basically what I had in mind, so he got what I wanted.
Now the first thing that needs to be done here is everything needs to be taken out of the case-PSU... all of it. Anything that those little pesky buggers--metal shavings--can crawl in the way. So here is a pic of one of the cases stripped down, literally to its naked carcass.
Now the first thing that I want to do here is attach the 2 cases together so they will stay together once its all done (would seriously suck if you went to move your case and the freakin' thing fell in half do to lack of a good job here), so this will take a while but it will stay together.
Here are a couple of pics that show what the plan is on the cutting of the actual case:
 
 
Pic 1: It shows where I want to cut the back of the case so it will not have the slot area inside. No reason to have it able to have a motherboard if there is never going to be one within on that side.
Pic 2: I'm removing the standard fan cover due to the fact that it really doesn't allow for good air-flow. if you can see the lines there, it shows that the 3.5 floppy bay is being cut out as well--well on this side of the case they won't be needed since this is the side of the case that I'm going to have all the extra components in, no drives.
Pic 3: In this one you can see that the motherboard tray has been removed--as I've already stated, no need for it to be there since the motherboard is going to be on the other half of the case.
Pic 4: Here it shows the hopeful plan of how I'm going to cut the side panels. The edging needs to be there for the correct spacing but the rest doesn't, so I'm going to cut some of it off so that I can run the cables through it.
Next step is to start the actual cutting.... Not quite there yet, but should be real soon... more updates coming!!!
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