WhiteBox - compact custom plexiglass case

Back in 2004, I was a fan of fun called Lan-Party. I think now, in the era of high-speed unlimited, many sin by gathering in the apartment of the "host" with laptops and playing their favorite games with friends. In 2004, neither my friends nor my friends had laptops yet, and we were going with desktop computers. Fortunately, our beloved hoster had a slightly different degree of killing of monitors and it was enough to bring only the system unit. Then WhiteBox was born, which received several upgrades and has remained relevant until now.

After careful study of the market and my own budget, I realized that I would have to do the building from scratch.
As a result, I got hold of sil1999 door from a greenhouse made of 9 mm plexiglass.
Two squares of 30x30 centimeters were cut with an electric jigsaw, slightly larger than the size of the motherboard in mATX format. They became the walls of the hull.
In one, holes were drilled according to the mATX marking, and “standard chassis elements” (the pieces on which the motherboard is held in the case) are screwed in as screws. MoBo is mounted on them.


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


The first version of WhiteBox had a motherboard with nForce2 chipset with integrated graphics GeForce 440 and Athlon XP 1500+. Quake3, StarCraft and NeedForSpeed ​​4.5, popular at that 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 integrated GeForce 6100, presented by l2k .
There was less and less time on LanParty, and WhiteBox moved into the category of the second home car, which I proudly showed the guests. I also installed Linux on it, which I was interested in experimenting with.


To write an article on Habr, I was encouraged by the fact that the WhiteBox recently received another unexpected upgrade. My motherboard burned out in my main computer, and I didn’t want to find a replacement for it, because I am buying a powerful laptop top that will replace my desktop computer. And instead of selling the remaining iron, I decided to upgrade my small machine.
For just 1,100 rubles, I bought a Gigabyte GA-73PVM-S2H mATX motherboard with integrated GeForce 7100. It was supplemented by the Core2 Quad Q6600, 4Gb DDR2 and SSD drive that were left out of work.
The result was a fairly powerful media center with HDMI, optical output and FireWire.
I also saw on sale boards for the 775 socket with an integrated GeForce 9400, but their price is close to 5,000 rubles, and no one plans to play on this computer in our family.
The article presents photographs of the very first revision of this computer, taken 7 years ago. In general, he changed slightly.