Project ghetto PC #2,452 (I'm sure there have been lots of these)

Alright so after realizing I have nearly enough spare PC parts to build a few extra computers what was my first thought? Sell off these spare componants you say and buy something useful? Hell no I thought, "I think its time to build a spare PC!"

So my plan was not spend as little as possible (< $50) and make a small server PC to run apache, php, mysql, etc for my webdevelopment needs (I'm sick of running it on my PC). This meant I'd have to find as many parts as I could around my house. I dug up the following:

PIII 850Mhz (socket 370)
Approx. 192MB SDRAM
10GB WD caviar hard drive
CDRW, floppy, etc of course

Now that left me with a few key parts missing, namely the motherboard (!) and a cooler for the CPU, since I ripped it out of a laptop and there was no way to use the cooler from that. I went to ebay for my parts and ended up with a $20 motherboard and a $3 HSF for socket 370. T

That now left me with one part missing... what was it... oh yeah the case hmm. I really didn't want to spend another $20-$30 for a mATX case for this thing, so I decided to use a spare piece of plexiglass I had lying around, cut it into the appropriate shape, and then put mounting screws in it.

Unfortunatly I had no digicam and the time of construction, but i've taken pics after the fact and you should be able to get a fairly good idea of how i set it up.

The motherboard and PSU mounted to the plexiglass "case":


Starting on the left we have the 52,24,52 CDRW drive, and underneith the 192MB of RAM, which consists of the top 128MB kingston stick and the 64MB no name something or other siemons stick. The video card I have there is a volari chip with 16MB onboard, and then of course the 10GB hard drive and standard floppy.


For the PSU i'm using an old 300W sparkle I dug up, should do the job nicely.


The motherboard does allow onboard video, but i'm assuming it sucks up RAM and it also doesnt display the boot screen whereas the PCI card does so its harder to boot into bios (a minor complaint but annoying when I was trying to get the finicky thing to work).


Finally here is everything connected... I'm starting to regret I didnt leave enough space for some sort of hard drive rack (I could have pulled one from another PC) but for now this is fine considering that for the moment I'm only running 1 drive.



I'm now in the process of installing UBUNTU on the box, and I'll update this thread with its final status and resting place

Ah while i'm at it I'm guessing it wont do harm but is it bad to have the HD so close to the PSU? Thanks guys

Ah curses, the kingston 128MB stick is bad according to memtest86 and the other stick appears to be 16MB and not 64MB, looks like i'll have to shell out a bit more for some new SDRAM... oh well

nice keyboard. That is the type I am looking for. What brand is it? SDRAM is easy and cheap. I have a drawer full so when I put all my Socket 7 and Slot 1's together I will have enough ram...

That would be a logitech G15 I got it when it was in cyber deals for like $30 or something...

http://www.syndrome-oc.net/kirikou/SOCdarko-20051117-193105.jpg

You should NOT install that in a case and leave it out on like an anti-static bag. That would be cool.

as long as the Hard drive is not covering any vent holes on the PSU it should be just fine.
As for the onboard video, generally there are settings in the BIOS that will tell it which display to initiate first. Ive rarely had problems with a 'slow' startup of the video on the boards I use so you might want to look into that to be sure (will save you a video card) Though it does still use the RAM.

alright thanks for the reassurances, turns out my memory problems were due to the board not supporting PC133 memory, but in any case I've got it up and running now with 256MB of PC100.

Here is is in its final resting place:


And the CPU fan was incredably loud so I did a quick 5V fan mod and its barely above a whisper now The P3 unfortuntaly is not quite cool enough to leave without a fan

sorry for the blurriness but I took this picture and forgot to focus it then my camera died so i didnt get a chance to take another one

soulfly1448 said:

You should NOT install that in a case and leave it out on like an anti-static bag. That would be cool.

Click to expand...

It was never my intention to buy a case for this its going to be sitting on that piece of plexi until the day it dies

When the mobo in my sig died, I pulled out my old 939 parts, and it was running on a anti-static bag for the better part of a month! Not the first time either.