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Monday 28 October 2002

The Ickle dilemma [lurks]

After Codeplay went bust, I picked up a couple of PCs from them cheap. One was a regular desktop which I rigged up for a chum of mine and another was a dinky little box which I purpose-built at Codeplay to act as the key server for the software Codeplay produced. I basically found a tiny little desktop case which was incredibly well made, proper steel with a tiny AOpen PSU.

I slapped in one of those PC Chips all-in-one micro ATX mobos, rounded it off with a 1GHz Athlon a 20GB FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing) Seagate drive, 256mb of memory in two sticks and that's about it. There's no floppy, no CD-ROM. In fact on the CD/DVD side - the Micro ATX mobo sits the CPU quite a ways forwards and is actually in the way of a full depth CD-ROM/DVD drive so that if I put one in it would poke half an inch out the front of the case. Doesn't bother me but might bother someone else.

Anyhow, I was going to replace my Shuttle SV24 system, Wench, with it because it'd be damn easy to make it silent. All I need to do is replace the silly little 60mm fan on the el-cheapo coolermaster HSF really. In particular I wanted to obtain some decent TV out as well but I think I've cracked that with that MPEG4 card I discussed earlier.

The issue with this dinky little desktop case is that it's slim-line and therefore the PCI slots are 'low profile'. I cannot easily find a place that will sell a low profile firewire card which I'd need for Wench's external storage. On the bright side, it has an AGP slot and crap loads of nvidia cards are low-profile factor. Not that it even appears to needs replacing, the KM133 integrated video TV-out is good.

Audio/LAN is all on board etc. There's room for another drive in the case for a 'phat' one and it's got a couple of PCI slots - you just need 'low profile' cards and to remove the brackets.

So what do I do with this machine, anyone want it? It's an ace little server, preinstalled with Win2K on it so far. Doesn't seem very floggable on EBay? I suppose the correct course of action is to try harder to find a low-profile firewire card and replace Wench and then EBay the Shuttle. Hmm.

6 comments:

  1. How big's the Audigy soundcard? They have firewire ports on.

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  2. Found a low-profile one that Dabs has, it's about a tenner too!

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  3. Latest update: I put my Athlon 1GHz AXIA chip in it, it had a Duron.Put in a much quieter fan on the CPU, noise is now quite acceptable.It's now got an ultra el-cheapo firewire card in it and I even managedto slot in a DVD drive which doesn't poke out the front of the case.

    However I must have been smoking some crack at some stage because itdoesn't have TV out. Had I realised that, I wouldn't have botheredwith all of this. I can't afford to put in a vid card with TV-out.Bah! I may as well start swapping Wench over to it anyway, that'sgonna be fun given all the apps and services on it. First stop, someold version of MDaemon...

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  4. If this update goes up, then it's all working pukka on Ickle - Rebot has moved!A strange though though, when I put the 1GHz AXIA Athlon in - it ran very hot. Too hot for the piss weak little HSF I put on it and it crashed after a couple and could not be revived. I put the Duron 1GHz back in and it runs quite cool. I guess the Athlon must be an older fab process that generates more heat.

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  5. u said you were eleminating your old sv24, i desperately need a replacement sv24 motherboard, and am willing to pay a reasonable ammount for it, email me WarriorRocker@gmail.com

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  6. This was over two years ago... Google isn't doing us any favors guys :-)

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