ibm 5150

[xr4man]

i didn't see an intro section here, so i'll just jump right into my only complete mod so far (other than just building my own pcs of course).

so, i've had this old ibm 5150 for years that i've been wanting to stuff with modern hardware. it's a big case, but because of the odd dimensions and placement of components, nothing really fits quite right. i had to wait for mobo technology to get small enough and affordable enough to fit.

so here's the specs:

intel mini-itx mobo with atom 330
2g ddr2 ram
200g sata hard drive
pata dvd burner
250w mini-itx power supply
aero-cool multi-function panel with removable hard drive.


the first thing i had to do was cut the i/o panel from another case and mount it in the back of the ibm. this was necessary since leaving a gaping hole in the back was unacceptable to me.

the mini-itx is a perfect fit behind the 5.25" drive bays. eventually i want to swap it out for a more powerful mobo that uses a nice amd processor at around 3ghz.

originally i had a dvd rom and a dvd burner. they sat side by side and the aero-cool panel sat above the left dvd rom.

with no real place to mount the hard drive, i was forced to just drill a couple of holes in the bottom of the case and mount it on it's side. same thing with the power supply. i spent a lot of time researching dimensions before i settled on the one i did. because of space constraints, i had to mount the ps up front and add in a new socket for the power cord in back.

here are the original pics.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00837.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00837.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00838.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00838.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00839.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00839.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00840.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00840.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00841.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00841.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00842.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00842.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00843.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00843.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00844.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00844.jpg)

[xr4man]

recently i have found some good sites that have given me ideas for future mods and i found out about hardware that i didn't think of before. so i ordered up a hard drive cage that uses two 5.25 bays and has a built in fan and filter. this was perfect for my hard drive mounting issue. it served two purposes. 1 was to give me a place to mount the hd better and the other was to give me an intake fan (like the atom really needs it right?). anyway, i moved the dvd burner to the upper right position and the aero-cool panel to the lower right position. this was better due to the usb cables hanging over the top of the dvd drive and interfering when trying to open it.

i then mounted the hd and installed the hd tray in the left position. everything is much better now.

here's the new layout

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00952.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00952.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00953.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00953.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00954.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00954.jpg)

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/th_DSC00955.jpg (http://s31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/?action=view&current=DSC00955.jpg)

hope you all enjoy seeing my creation.

[xr4man]

man, 400 views and not a single comment. not even "hey that looks like crap" or "my grandma can mod a pc better than that". no comments at all is the worst to me.

[Airbozo]

man, 400 views and not a single comment. not even "hey that looks like crap" or "my grandma can mod a pc better than that". no comments at all is the worst to me.
Check Food Lovers Specials (https://www.especials.co.za/food-lovers/) and Game Specials (https://www.especials.co.za/game/).

lol, Give it a couple of days!

It get slow around here come friday.


I do love this mod. I like seeing all the system I have worked on in my life get a new lease on the technology FWY.

One improvement that is needed is cabling. Clean it up and hide it under the DVD.

[msmrx57]

:stupid: Personally I rarely get a chance to look on here on the weekends.

Nice retro mod. :up: I like seeing thing being reused as much as possible.

[MrGoat]

I've been wanting to do one of these myself. My Father in law had a stack of them in his garage and when I asked for one he had donated them two days earlier. So now I have this old Gateway 2000 that will proboly end up being my retromod box.

[xr4man]

lol, Give it a couple of days!

It get slow around here come friday.


I do love this mod. I like seeing all the system I have worked on in my life get a new lease on the technology FWY.

One improvement that is needed is cabling. Clean it up and hide it under the DVD.

no sweat man. it's always a learning curve to figure out how a new forum works.

i'm hoping to have some other stuff to impress people with in the not too distant future. unfortunately my car hobbies (addictions) are way more expensive than computers. that takes up any play money i have.

[x88x]

Looks good, man. I always like seeing really old systems getting stuffed with new hardware. :D ..though, personally I would have tried to stuff a high-performance gaming system in it...would make for an awesome sleeper. :twisted:


man, 400 views and not a single comment. not even "hey that looks like crap" or "my grandma can mod a pc better than that". no comments at all is the worst to me.
Unfortunately, I'll often be browsing the board late at night, as I'm about to go to bed, and grab some threads that I think "oh yeah, that sounds interesting, I'll set that over here and read it in the morning"....which never happens... Such was the case here. :P

[SXRguyinMA]

man, 400 views and not a single comment. not even "hey that looks like crap" or "my grandma can mod a pc better than that". no comments at all is the worst to me.

Hey. That looks like crap! My Grandma can mod a PC better than that! :facepalm:

lol just kidding, looks sweet :D

[xr4man]

i was thinking i might play around with some cable management, so i opened it up and started rerouting and stuffing cables under the drive bays. it does look a little cleaner, but since there are no windows or anything, i decided it was futile. i'll leave the real cable management for my next project.

[Airbozo]

i was thinking i might play around with some cable management, so i opened it up and started rerouting and stuffing cables under the drive bays. it does look a little cleaner, but since there are no windows or anything, i decided it was futile. i'll leave the real cable management for my next project.

In a closed case, the main reason for cable management is to provide better airflow. After that you are right, it is almost futile.

[xr4man]

that's very true. the way i have it now, i think, provides plenty of airflow. there's not much i can do with the mobo power and the disk power cables. they are almost exactly the right length to connect.

[xr4man]

well, i thought this was a finished build, but then microsoft had to come out with home server 2011 and it was cheap. so since i needed a media server anyway, since the remote for my bedroom htpc was interfering with the new remote for the main room htpc, i decided to use the main htpc as the server since it's running a power sipping atom processor.

soooo. here it is all opened up again.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/2c6b4bb5.jpg

and what could this possibly be????? yes, the 2 TB drive from my bedroom htpc has donated itself to teh server for file storage.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/6dd822bd.jpg

and this is just a screen shot of whs 2011 installing.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/aae08243.jpg

[Xpirate]

I did this with an old IBM XT case before back when Pentium 90 was state of the art. I wish I still had it now so I could post a picture.

[xr4man]

i've got it all set up and streaming movies and music quite nicely.

[xr4man]

well, since i can't leave well enough alone, i gutted this and transplanted all teh internals into an old hp case. the server is back up and running and now i present the next and hopefully last incarnation for a really long time.

the important hardware consists of:
biostar socket lga775 mobo (micro-atx)
dual core celeron @ 2.6ghz
4g ocz ram (stolen from the blue oyster pc)
xfx radeon hd 4670 (forgot to get a picture)
250g sata 2 laptop drive

it's running windows 8 developer's preview and xbmc just fine. all the windows 7 drivers loaded up just fine.

here are the new stuffs i got to put in it.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01264.jpg

i didn't get pics of actually putting it all in, but you all know what that looks like anyway. so here are the completed pics.

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01255.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01256.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01258.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01259.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01260.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01261.jpg

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/DSC01262.jpg

and with that, this should be complete now. time to just sit back and enjoy some netflix.

[AmEv]

Do a bit-by-bit comparison of old specs and new specs!

[xr4man]

haha, that's a cool idea. i'll get on that right away.

[xr4man]

ok, here it is

by just sheer processor speed this new one is 500 times faster than the original. take the extra core into consideration and it's 1000 times faster. lol

http://i31.photobucket.com/albums/c369/xr4man/pc%20mods/29a983dd.jpg

[AmEv]

Take into consideration 16-bit vs. 64 bit....

HDD space....



Expandablilty....

GPU speed........



We've gone a long way.

[xr4man]

yeah, a dude at work mentioned those things to me too, but the calculations were more than my brain could handle, lol. so i just looked at processor speed alone. i didn't want to make my head explode yet.

[AmEv]

Now, I need to find my parents' IBM, work on it lol.

[xr4man]

my suggestion would be to locate the mobo all the way to one side or the other to make room for a full size power supply. also the mobo can only be 8.4 inches deep.

[AmEv]

Almost seems like you can almost squeeze it onto the other side of where you had it.....

[xr4man]

yes with a little bit of cutting THAT power supply would fit on the other side, but not a standard atx. the case isn't all enough to put an atx ps on it's side and with the mobo in the middle there isn't enough room on either side to lay it down.

now of course if you used a mini-itx board like i did originally, then there is plenty of room to lay down an atx ps in the same location that i have the new ps.

[AmEv]

Will look into it.


Now, need to find it (if they still have it.....)

[nevermind1534]

Take into consideration 16-bit vs. 64 bit....

and the extra instruction sets

[xr4man]

this thing is running great as my htpc and running win8. the power supply fan is inaudible with this stuck in the tv stand. so i'm glad i don't have to open it back up to rewire the fan.

[ghstzch]

I'm going to be making one of these with an XT-5160. Any tips or problems you encountered along the way?

[xr4man]

there's not really anything difficult to it.

the main thing is to mount the mobo all the way to one side or the other instead of in the middle like i did. that should give you plenty of room to use a full size power supply.

the other thing is you'll need to either use a mini-itx mobo or a micro-atx mobo that is only 6.7" deep. i could only find a couple of biostar mobos that fit that size restriction. you might be able to get away with a mobo slightly bigger than that, but it will depend on where the connectors and ram are located as part of the board would have to sit under the 5-1/4" bays.

[ghstzch]

I bought the D525MW, and the Scythe Control panel, a stick of 2GB DDR3 SODIMM RAM that is compliant with the Atom Mobo. I also bought a COOLMAX CA-300 300W ATX Power Supply. That will work with the ITX processor though right?

[xr4man]

yes. you shouldn't have any problems. the whole system shouldn't pull much more than about 40w at full bore. so your power supply is more than adequate.

[ghstzch]

Thank you for all your help. Will post results!