- Joined
- Apr 12, 2002
A little background on how the wooden Dualie case came to be. First, so you do not think Gulp has multiple personalities (or is Bob Dole), let me explain that this article is written by Junebug, Gulp’s dad.
We started talking about this case when we first saw the AMD Tech Tour 2005 advertising a server bundle that consisted of a Tyan Thunder K8SD Pro and two Operton 246’s. We had been successful in the past overclocking Athlon’s and A64's and wondered if we had any hope with this. We quickly learned that we probably could not. But given the neat idea of owning a dualie (we had been talking about this on and off for a while), and the pretty generous horsepower/$ available in this deal (we are protein folders for Stanford U. (Folding @ Home)) we decided to take the plunge.
We also found out quickly that everything associated with servers is expensive (memory, power supplies, etc.) This board measures 12” x13”. We were planning to make this into a presentable computer (i.e. not one of folding farm “cows” ), so it needed some type of case. Not many cases are available for this size board (considered an extended ATX or eATX). Choices were slim, and expensive.
We actually bought two of these boards, on for us, and one for my work. The one at work is covered by a corporate budget, so what I bought is a 4U rackmount server case and will mount it on a bench top. We considered this, but did not think this would look to good in our living room (where this computer was slated to be sited).
Server cases were expensive, and to be truthful, pretty boring: just a steel or aluminum box 21” high, 8 inches wide and 19 inches deep. And you can’t see the neat set up inside the box, unless you get one with a window (not for me although Gulp’s water-cooled case looks nice), and even if you do go with the window, the box is on the floor and you can’t really see in it.
I had also seen some cases at SVC that look interesting. They call them HSPC tech stations. They’re basically an open frame where the power supply and the CD-ROM sit on a top shelf, the hard drive and the floppy hang from the bottom of that shelf, and then the motherboard sits on the very bottom, out in the open. This looked “techie”, but I really did not like the power supply and CD-ROM being the center of attention. The Motherboard should be the star!
After much discussing with Gulp, we decided to swap it around and make the motherboard sit above all the ancillary equipment. I like the cube computers I had seen, and I thought maybe this could be a cube also. We could have squeezed down to a 14x14 footprint but that would have been really tight. And we really did not need 14” in height. It would have started looking really empty up top. We really only needed 5 inches on the bottom layer, and 7 inches (six inches clear above the motherboard) would fit any heat sink we could ever imagine. If we stretched it out to 16.5 x 16.5, we would have plenty of room, and we could make the levels out of three ¼ x6 inch boards of oak glued together (actual width is 5.5 inches per board).
We thought we would need some serious cooling so we decided to have eight fans to blow across the motherboard (our experience had been A64's run pretty warm so we expected dual Opterons would be equally hot). Now many wonder about wood and cooling. Wood is a lousy heat transfer material, but on most computers, the vast majority of the heat is carried away by the air via forced convection (fan blowing cool air across the heat sink and then out of the case), and very little is from heat conducting through the case, and then being cooled by natural convection (i.e. hot object in cool room with no fan). We decided we would blow the air over the processors first and then out over the rest of the board.
We also choose wood because it is easy to work with. We consider Aluminum (also pretty easy to work with, but we did not want all the bolts or rivets and we don’t have any easy way to weld aluminum. We also considered composite (epoxy/foam/fiberglass/carbon fiber), that would be pretty straightforward also, but we wanted something kind of furniture-like for the living room.
Okay, so we decided to go with thin Oak, glued together and we had a rough layout. We ran out to the local Lowe’s and bought some nice Oak boards (Home Depot does not seem to carry this stuff). We started gluing the wood together, and cut them to 16.5" long. We decide we wanted then to be a little stiffer, so we put three small 3/8" x 3/8" stringers running perpendicular to the glue joints/grain to stiffen them up. We took a break, and ran out to the Tech Tour and bought our bundles! We figured out where the board would sit, and where the cables would run down to the bottom and we installed the standoffs and cut the holes, (by the way, the stand offs are 3/4" inch oak dowel cut 7/8" long. A brass screw comes up from the bottom, and a brass nut holds the dowel down, and makes it so the board only touches in a small area (so we don’t put the load on any of the surface mounted components on the bottom of the board).
The frame of the case is also ¾” dowel that run up from each corner. Two 1/2"x1/2" stringers tie each side together and also act to hold the motherboard tray in the proper place. We drilled the holes for the motherboard tray to slide up and down on.
We started talking about this case when we first saw the AMD Tech Tour 2005 advertising a server bundle that consisted of a Tyan Thunder K8SD Pro and two Operton 246’s. We had been successful in the past overclocking Athlon’s and A64's and wondered if we had any hope with this. We quickly learned that we probably could not. But given the neat idea of owning a dualie (we had been talking about this on and off for a while), and the pretty generous horsepower/$ available in this deal (we are protein folders for Stanford U. (Folding @ Home)) we decided to take the plunge.
We also found out quickly that everything associated with servers is expensive (memory, power supplies, etc.) This board measures 12” x13”. We were planning to make this into a presentable computer (i.e. not one of folding farm “cows” ), so it needed some type of case. Not many cases are available for this size board (considered an extended ATX or eATX). Choices were slim, and expensive.
We actually bought two of these boards, on for us, and one for my work. The one at work is covered by a corporate budget, so what I bought is a 4U rackmount server case and will mount it on a bench top. We considered this, but did not think this would look to good in our living room (where this computer was slated to be sited).
Server cases were expensive, and to be truthful, pretty boring: just a steel or aluminum box 21” high, 8 inches wide and 19 inches deep. And you can’t see the neat set up inside the box, unless you get one with a window (not for me although Gulp’s water-cooled case looks nice), and even if you do go with the window, the box is on the floor and you can’t really see in it.
I had also seen some cases at SVC that look interesting. They call them HSPC tech stations. They’re basically an open frame where the power supply and the CD-ROM sit on a top shelf, the hard drive and the floppy hang from the bottom of that shelf, and then the motherboard sits on the very bottom, out in the open. This looked “techie”, but I really did not like the power supply and CD-ROM being the center of attention. The Motherboard should be the star!
After much discussing with Gulp, we decided to swap it around and make the motherboard sit above all the ancillary equipment. I like the cube computers I had seen, and I thought maybe this could be a cube also. We could have squeezed down to a 14x14 footprint but that would have been really tight. And we really did not need 14” in height. It would have started looking really empty up top. We really only needed 5 inches on the bottom layer, and 7 inches (six inches clear above the motherboard) would fit any heat sink we could ever imagine. If we stretched it out to 16.5 x 16.5, we would have plenty of room, and we could make the levels out of three ¼ x6 inch boards of oak glued together (actual width is 5.5 inches per board).
We thought we would need some serious cooling so we decided to have eight fans to blow across the motherboard (our experience had been A64's run pretty warm so we expected dual Opterons would be equally hot). Now many wonder about wood and cooling. Wood is a lousy heat transfer material, but on most computers, the vast majority of the heat is carried away by the air via forced convection (fan blowing cool air across the heat sink and then out of the case), and very little is from heat conducting through the case, and then being cooled by natural convection (i.e. hot object in cool room with no fan). We decided we would blow the air over the processors first and then out over the rest of the board.
We also choose wood because it is easy to work with. We consider Aluminum (also pretty easy to work with, but we did not want all the bolts or rivets and we don’t have any easy way to weld aluminum. We also considered composite (epoxy/foam/fiberglass/carbon fiber), that would be pretty straightforward also, but we wanted something kind of furniture-like for the living room.
Okay, so we decided to go with thin Oak, glued together and we had a rough layout. We ran out to the local Lowe’s and bought some nice Oak boards (Home Depot does not seem to carry this stuff). We started gluing the wood together, and cut them to 16.5" long. We decide we wanted then to be a little stiffer, so we put three small 3/8" x 3/8" stringers running perpendicular to the glue joints/grain to stiffen them up. We took a break, and ran out to the Tech Tour and bought our bundles! We figured out where the board would sit, and where the cables would run down to the bottom and we installed the standoffs and cut the holes, (by the way, the stand offs are 3/4" inch oak dowel cut 7/8" long. A brass screw comes up from the bottom, and a brass nut holds the dowel down, and makes it so the board only touches in a small area (so we don’t put the load on any of the surface mounted components on the bottom of the board).
The frame of the case is also ¾” dowel that run up from each corner. Two 1/2"x1/2" stringers tie each side together and also act to hold the motherboard tray in the proper place. We drilled the holes for the motherboard tray to slide up and down on.