Project: Ultimedia Blue

Recently, I was talking with a college IT Director friend of mine and he decided to give me heads up on when he was doing a yearly clean up of the PCs and servers the college no longer wanted or used.

I was able to save a couple servers and a bunch of PCs from the 'prep' area before they went into a waste truck headed to the city dump's shredders.

One of the servers I just had to make my new main PC.

It started as a basic white Chenbro SR-103 case with a 800Mhz xeon setup (which I trashed out in liew of new components).

I had a basic idea of what I wanted to do in my mind and I worked from there...my goal was to create a new, more powerful multimedia machine...basically Ultimedia's replacement.

I stripped the case down to the basic framework and started cutting the windows I wanted. I thought of going with tinted lexan for all the windows but it was just too dark for this mod.

I didn't like the lines in the basic case, and I didn't like all the 'led' indicator lights in the front of the case.

While I was cutting, my buddy Curtis started filling in the lines and holes with fiberglass.

Re: Project: Ultimedia Blue

After the cutting and fiberglass was done, we both grabbed different sections of the PC and start sanding down the fiberglass.

After all the sanding was done, we both took cans of automotive primer and did the 'prime-sand-prime' dance that all experianced case modders who like a nice paint job have done time and time again.

At this point, I also primed covers and handles for three of my removable harddrive bays. Since they were white, they were throwing off my "black drive's only" setup. Primer set us up for a later coat of black paint and lacquer.

Finally we were done with primer and we then moved on to the actual paint, a deep blue with small metallic silver flecks. We did five coats of paint, with sanding in-between coats, then three coats of lacquer, with a final wet sanding of 3000 grit sandpaper.

Me

I looked back at the case and decided I didn't like the PSU the way it was and I didn't like how the outside was a nice blue while the inside was still the standard bare metel...so...

....I ripped it apart and installed the PSU circuit board inside of a custom made Lexan shell. It's overly aircooled with the 120mm fan pulling air from below, and 2x40mm fans blowing onto the heatsinks, while a 80mm fan pulls air out an away from the PSU. The internal metel was painted blue as well, and the back, top, front and bottom of the case was painted a satin black with laqucer covering.

I decided to use rivets to hold the side windows in place. I also decided to use liquid nails for the front two windows, and LCD window. So...here is the finished product!

(the cold cathode fell down out of it's spot...I had forgotten to clean the area where I put the adhesive first)

I dropped the room lights to show the LCD in action...

The blue circle in the small window is actually my Bulgin Anti-vandal power switch from Xoxide.

And here is a video of the LCD in action:

Finally, I have 10 blue cold cathodes running in this server. 4 per side (top, edges, bottom) and two on either side of the window of the front bay door. There are two 'windshield washer sprayer lights' I have mounted to the bottom of the PC as well. (I'll update with pics later on that)

So...what are the specs?

CPU: AMD Athlon 64bit FX-62 Dualcore @ 2.8Ghz
RAM: OCZ Dual Channel XTC 4096MB PC5400 DDR2 667MHz Gamer Memory (4 x 1024MB) matched
Video: Nvida 8800GTS 320
HDD: 2.5 Terabytes accross eight harddrives (6 SATA, 1 IDE, 1 External USB)
Drives: DVD-RW
MB: DFI LANPARTY UT NF590 SLI-M2R/G
PSU: OCZ GameXStream Power Supply (NVIDIA SLI-Ready) 850Watt
Extras: Hauppauge WinTV PVR2 USB
KB: Zippy STQ (Slim-Thin-Quiet) gaming keyboard
Mouse: Logitech MX-518 gaming mouse
(Sometimes use Logitech wireless MX5000 keyboard/lazer mouse)
speakers: Logitech X-540 5.1 speakers
OS: Windows Vista, Windows XP Pro, Solaris 10 (depending on my mood...just need to swap removable harddrives and away I go.)

So why do I need all that HDD space? The Hauppauge works wonderfully with Vista Ultimate's Media Center and allows me to record shows I would normally miss and watch cable while I am surfing or gaming.

You are the first ever to see this case as I JUST completed it. Happy Modding!