Well I've decided that if I were to make an HTPC, I don't think I would want to spend more than $50 on a case. So, why not try to make your own? I did a little googling, and I saw that other people attempted to make it and succeeded. We had a spare VCR that we don't use anymore, I got into my cleaning mode.


Front picture before I started opening it.

Back of the VCR

Then I opened it up and started cleaning out... After 30 minutes I was done.




I was thinking about spray-painting the whole thing black. Probably going to have to do some dremel work to have the motherboard fit in there, lots of little plastic pieces sticking up. 4" doesn't seem like it will be high enough, even for the smallest heatsink. I may have to abandon already, what do you guys think? I could probably cut a hole in the top of the case if I had to, but I want to keep this as compact as possible.

More dimensions of the case. Here's a quick Paint picture I made.


Feedback, suggestions, questions, ask away! Please also recommend parts for this build that would suit it, I haven't got anything yet, but I do have an old Gateway 900 in the basement that I could test with.

EDIT: Starting to think that it is a little longer that 9.5" It would have to be anyways if I wanted to put in a ATX or mATX motherboard. So that shouldn't be a problem. Now I'm thinking about power supply, what could fit..

You might want to re-measure it; I'd guestimate it to be around 16x12.

Probably too tight for an ATX or mATX board; you may need to go with a mini-ITX board.

That's what I was thinking. But mini-ITX only have 1 PCI slot right? If I wanted this to just record programs on my television, I wouldn't need a sound card right?

Remeasured, length is still 13 inches, width might be 10"

you don't need a dedicated sound card; TV tuners handle both the audio and video input.

You might be able to get a mATX in there, but it'll be tight.

For a mini-ITX system you can go with a picoPSU (powered by an external brick) that wouldn't take up any addtional space in the case. There are also some SFX power supplies available (designed for SFF cases) that would be a good choice for a mATX system.

Yeah I saw a Seasonic one that looked nice. Let me check out those picoPSUs.

How would a C7 CPU do for recording?

From what I can tell, the C7 2.0GHz is about on par with a P3 1.3GHz.

I did see that there are several mini-ITX boards that support mobile C2D processors (e.g. JetWay J9F2-KHDE-PB); so that might be your best bet.

Well someone else mentioned if I'm going to spend $500 on, should I just buckle down a buy a real case? I really didn't want this to go over $300 though.

Perhaps an older board and CPU might help. You can probably get a AMD S462 or Intel S370 that might allow you to use a smaller heatsink.

Yeah, too bad I just sold a computer that I could have used this for. Hmm...