Pro/Forums - View Single Post

airspirit · 11-14-2003, 12:37 PM

Be careful ... some of the less science minded might hijack your thread and insist that it's more like 6,000 years or 50 years or 5 seconds, or whatever their current fairy tale espouses.

Have you considered building a briefcase PC? You take a decent sized briefcase (3-4" deep), mount a 17" LCD in it, mount actual desktop PC components inside with the ports for your keyboard accessable (this can be stored inside with your mouse as well), and if done right you can have an honest to god desktop in a briefcase (your fans and components will be exposed, so no deltas will be necessary) and you will be the envy of geeks everywhere. I'm going to do one of these for my brother one of these days, though I'll watercool his ....

If you don't need the optical drives, this leaves you with just your hard drive as the only real internal component. Your PSU can be modified to run slimline (use an old CDROM box) with a few 30-40mm fans ventilating it. Make sure your board is an IGP board (obvious) and mount your HDD and PSU over the PCI slots on your board (no cooling necessary here) or next to it if your briefcase has the room. Install a plexiglass (for r33tness) shroud over a large portion of the board (with vents on both sides mounted with low profile 80mm fans in a push-pull configuration) and use a 2U or so heatsink (with the two 80mm intakes over it for ventilation). Modify your NB heatsink with a Vantec copper iceberq for extra cooling. Undervolt the processor (I would recommend a stock 3200+ for this project, natch) for lower heat output. Mount the mobo and components on a base lexan sheet and ensure that your grounding cable from the motherboard is heavily insulated and installed correctly. If everything is done right, you should have your middle tray giving you a perfect stand for your full size (minus the 10-key portion) keyboard and mouse when the briefcase is closed. If done right, you could construct a monster like this for under $1000 and it would put all those bargain basement POS laptops to shame.

So, whaddayasay? Sound like fun? It sure would be more up to the task of compiling and such than a crappy bottom feeder laptop, and just think of the envy you will get ....

11-14-2003, 12:37 PM	#4
airspirit Been /.'d... have you? Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Moscow, ID Posts: 1,986	Be careful ... some of the less science minded might hijack your thread and insist that it's more like 6,000 years or 50 years or 5 seconds, or whatever their current fairy tale espouses. Have you considered building a briefcase PC? You take a decent sized briefcase (3-4" deep), mount a 17" LCD in it, mount actual desktop PC components inside with the ports for your keyboard accessable (this can be stored inside with your mouse as well), and if done right you can have an honest to god desktop in a briefcase (your fans and components will be exposed, so no deltas will be necessary) and you will be the envy of geeks everywhere. I'm going to do one of these for my brother one of these days, though I'll watercool his .... If you don't need the optical drives, this leaves you with just your hard drive as the only real internal component. Your PSU can be modified to run slimline (use an old CDROM box) with a few 30-40mm fans ventilating it. Make sure your board is an IGP board (obvious) and mount your HDD and PSU over the PCI slots on your board (no cooling necessary here) or next to it if your briefcase has the room. Install a plexiglass (for r33tness) shroud over a large portion of the board (with vents on both sides mounted with low profile 80mm fans in a push-pull configuration) and use a 2U or so heatsink (with the two 80mm intakes over it for ventilation). Modify your NB heatsink with a Vantec copper iceberq for extra cooling. Undervolt the processor (I would recommend a stock 3200+ for this project, natch) for lower heat output. Mount the mobo and components on a base lexan sheet and ensure that your grounding cable from the motherboard is heavily insulated and installed correctly. If everything is done right, you should have your middle tray giving you a perfect stand for your full size (minus the 10-key portion) keyboard and mouse when the briefcase is closed. If done right, you could construct a monster like this for under $1000 and it would put all those bargain basement POS laptops to shame. So, whaddayasay? Sound like fun? It sure would be more up to the task of compiling and such than a crappy bottom feeder laptop, and just think of the envy you will get .... __________________ #!/bin/sh {who;} {last;} {pause;} {grep;} {touch;} {unzip;} mount /dev/girl -t {wet;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} {fsck;} echo yes yes yes {yes;} umount {/dev/girl;zip;} rm -rf {wet.spot;} {sleep;} finger: permission denied