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.

[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

hope you all enjoy seeing my creation.

[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.

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

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

[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.

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.

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

[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

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