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lose the case, surface mount pc?
tony.silveira:
nice! you have the board mounted to the side of your cab? curious as to how you support the video card, if at all.
thank you for the link!
DillonFoulds:
Integrated Nvidia 6600. Had to find a motherboard with a video card that supported Soft-15KHz, but if you stick to ATI or nVidia and steer clear of Intel GPUs, you should be okay. The only expansion card I have connected is Wifi, but I have a very slim card, with the bracket removed, so there's not much weight involved.
Edit:
kegger:
I have basically done this both ways as I built a portable box such as arcade in a box and I found it much more challenging to mount everything seperate and keep everything secure. A stripped PC case with the sides off works fine and is easier to deal with as you can remove the whole PC should get some type of hardware issue and need to trouble shoot.
bkenobi:
I don't agree that decasing a PC fixes heat issues. The only true solution to heat problems is to remove the heat from the enclosure. If you have no case but no ventilation at the top and bottom of the cab, you still will have heat issues given a long enough period of time (assuming you have a wooden cab). If your PC case has a good cooling system (well designed air flow), you are actually going to be better off than just surface mounting everything without the case. I won't get into technical details, but it has to do with forced convection being more efficient for cooling than natural convection especially with a lower delta temperature between the ambient air and the component temperature (especially if you have poor cabinet ventilation).
If you force air through your cabinet (draw cool air in the bottom, vent out the top), then you probably would be fine without the case since the ambient temperature will be fairly cool (unless it's a hot summer day of course).
zafdor:
--- Quote from: bkenobi on May 24, 2010, 11:22:09 am ---If you force air through your cabinet (draw cool air in the bottom, vent out the top), then you probably would be fine without the case since the ambient temperature will be fairly cool (unless it's a hot summer day of course).
--- End quote ---
Spot on. I love it when I see designs with several fans and air flow willy-nilly. Set the air flow up so it comes in one end, is forced to go over the hot components and out the other end and you are done, it is surprising how little air flow it takes to keep the unit cool. Use your mobo temp monitoring or buy an el cheapo thermometer at radio shack to verify your design.
I don't have a dedicated game room, so my goal is always to keep the cab small. putting a cased PC in the cab was never on the radar.