Well, as many lan party goers know, the chenming and it's many offspring ATX towers are big and heavy as hell. They're a pain to drag to lan parites, and just aren't as much fun anymore.

so here's the project: my younger brother is into robitcs, and has got extensive knowlege of metalworking, building frames and what not for his work. We've come up with a plan to build a custom aluminium case, specifically for This mobo along with an XP 2400+, 1gb ram, single hdd, single optical drive, and a r9500 pro (might go with a better vid card but not sure yet).

we're looking for ideas / suggestions on what would work well, or look good and be functional.

so what exactly do you need to know do you want to know what kind of parts to put in it or what?

size, ideal air flow, cooling, suggestions on exact materials. things of that nature

Well...

Aluminum case.

Airflow, make 2 92mm intake, 2 92mm exhaust. 1 120mm blowhole on top, then 1 80mm side intake.

Depends on how many drives and stuff you want in it. CD-Rom, burner, dvd drive or burner, fan controller, temperature display. That's 5 there.

Hard drives, how much space you need? 2 on raid0 would be fast.

small, 1 hdd, 1 optical, and an micro atx board. not going big here

gonna keep the big monsters at my desk and use this one for lan parties.

make a pyrimid

you said your brother is in robotics? Well why dont you make it so it has wheels? Like a remote controll car. So you dont have to carry it into lan partys, you drive it into the lan partys. Actully i got this idea from a Maximum PC magizine so it wouldent be original.

again looking for light. the monster they built weighs in over 130lbs and has a cost of over $200,000. not what I'm looking to do

this is the machine shop he has access to at all times of day or night along with the frame from this years robot.





so you can guess the kinda trouble we can cause.

Hmm well first off i would go for the "desktop" style of case rather than tower.. i think haveing the motherboard be flat would make things a lot easier.. maybe if you could make a slideing motherboard tray, with a kind of "roof" on top of it where the psu, hdd and optical drives sit. May be a little bigger but the shape would not be hard to carry.

Oh and by the way i feal your pain with the chieftech server case.. it has become boring and a huge pain to move... I would honestly prefer some of my friends lighter, smaller beigh boxes.

here's what's going on so far: 7 1/2" tall x 10 1/2" wide x 10 1/2" deep.

DVDrom and HDD are going to sit under the motherboard tray (carved from the remains of an old tower along with other parts of steel). 4 "legs" come up from the bottom tray (holding the drives) to support the mobo tray. Plexiglass sides will attach to these 4 legs along with the power suply. Cooling is as follows: cpu has 80mm fan, which blows out, and actually blows directly out of the case, 80mm fan in front of case, moves air in. remaining air goes out via the MATX power suply.

I'm hoping this will be enough to cool this thing. 7200rpm maxtor HDD, xp 2400+ tbred b core, 2 sticks of 512mb pc3200 DDR, FX5600, Asus A7V8X-VM, cpu HS is an alpha pal205 with an 80mm antec smart fan (same as front of case) and a DEER 250w matx power suply with 60mm fan (may replace with higherflow delta fan if needed)

Here is my suggestion. Drop the 2400+ and get a 2500+ Barton (only 90 bucks at newegg).

Scratch the 5600 and get a 9500 Pro, it smokes the 5600. Anywhere from 10 fps to about 25-30. With AA an AF it smokes it even more. http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1797&p=7

going with what's already sitting on the bench at home for this. the only things I've had to buy are mobo and psu.