WhiteBox - compact custom-plexiglas case

Back in 2004, I was a fan of fun called the Lan Party. I think even now, in the era of high-speed no-limit, many people sin because they gather in the apartment of the hoster with laptops and play with their friends in their favorite games. In 2004, neither I nor my friends had laptops yet, and we were going with desktop computers. Fortunately, our beloved hoster had several different degrees of monitor killing and it was enough to bring only the system unit. Then WhiteBox was born, which received several upgrades and is still relevant.

After a careful study of the market and my own budget, I realized that I would have to do the case from scratch.
As a result, I got hold of a sil1999 door from a greenhouse made of 9-mm plexiglass.
The electric fretsaw sawed two squares of 30x30 centimeters, a little more than the size of the motherboard of the format mATX. They became the walls of the hull.
In one, the holes were drilled on the mATX markup, and how the self-tapping screws are screwed into “standard chassis elements” (the things on which the motherboard is held in the case). MoBo is mounted on them.


The standard ATX format power supply has undergone some refinement. He was released from the body, and the radiators were bent at a right angle to reduce the height of the PSU.
The power supply unit together with the hard drive is mounted on the second wall.
Both walls are connected with threaded rods and nuts. The power supply rests on expansion slots.
Bright blue LEDs were mounted in the walls, as a result only matte ends glow, which looks quite nice in the dark.


In the first version of WhiteBox, there was a motherboard with an nForce2 chipset with integrated GeForce 440 and Athlon XP 1500+ graphics. Quake3, StarCraft and NeedForSpeed ​​4.5, which were popular at the time, worked quite comfortably, so the problem was solved.
After some time, WhiteBox received an upgrade in the form of Athlon 64 3000+ and a motherboard with an integrated GeForce 6100, presented by l2k .
There was less and less time left for LanParty, and the WhiteBox moved into the category of the second home machine, which I proudly showed to the guests. I also put a Linux on it with which I was interested in experimenting.
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To write an article on Habr I was inspired by the fact that WhiteBox recently received another unexpected upgrade. In my main computer, the motherboard burned down, and I didn’t want to look for a replacement for it, because I was buying a powerful laptop top that I would replace with a desktop computer. And instead of selling the remaining iron, I decided to upgrade my little car.
For only 1100 rubles, I bought a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H mATX motherboard with integrated GeForce 7100. It was supplemented with the remaining Core2 Quad Q6600, 4Gb DDR2 and SSD.
The result was a fairly powerful media center with HDMI, optical output and FireWire.
I also saw motherboards for 775 sockets with an integrated GeForce 9400, but their price is approaching 5,000 rubles, and no one plans to play on this computer in our family.
The article presents photos of the very first revision of this computer, taken 7 years ago. In general, he has changed slightly.