Ingraham

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 8:21 am

My latest:

I call it Ingraham after the Ingraham Cabinet Co. that made many wooden radio cases during the 30's and 40's. The specific inspiration is the Stromberg Carlson model 1110H radio with Ingraham case.

American black walnut veneer over basswood and aircraft-grade plywood cladding the aluminum skin of a Silverstone LC06 mini-ITX case. Centerpiece is an Arlen Ness baby moon gas cap for a Harley Davidson motorcycle. It is chrome-plated billet aluminum.

Evercool Fox-1 system blower controlled by a rheostat. Back panel is burl walnut.

VIA VB8001 mainboard with 16x PCI-e slot. VIA Nano processor at 1.6GHz.

4GB of Crucial DDR2 and a Crucial 64GB SSD mounted below the board. Large red blower support bracket to help protect it during shipping.

The Ingraham will debut to the public at CES in Jan in conjunction with VIA's Nano CPU hoopla.

Thanks for looking!

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 8:40 am

How funny.. I was just looking at the pics and description from the link on the front page of http://www.hardocp.com/ . Very nice work! I'm curious though, with such a low powered system, couldn't you get by with just some slow-turnning 120 or even 92mm fans as intakes in the front or something? I see the slot blower in the pics, and usually blowers are far louder per CFM than standard fans.

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 8:49 am

AZBrandon wrote:How funny.. I was just looking at the pics and description from the link on the front page of http://www.hardocp.com/ . Very nice work! I'm curious though, with such a low powered system, couldn't you get by with just some slow-turnning 120 or even 92mm fans as intakes in the front or something? I see the slot blower in the pics, and usually blowers are far louder per CFM than standard fans.

Thanks for that. You might have the scale out of whack. Those are 3" (76mm) vent ducts in front. I don't like attaching fans to the front of a case because of the noise they project. The blower is rheostat-controlled and runs on the lowest setting here during the winter. We'll see when summer comes. Thanks for posting!

ntavlas · Post by **ntavlas** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 9:37 am

Beautifully made!

Completely agree about frontal intake fans, how come you didn`t use the bottom like in your past projects? It was a very elegant solution that inspired the cooling setup of my HTPC.

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 10:14 am

ntavlas wrote:Beautifully made!

Completely agree about frontal intake fans, how come you didn`t use the bottom like in your past projects? It was a very elegant solution that inspired the cooling setup of my HTPC.

Thanks buddy! I thought about venting through the bottom but my favorite feature of the original design is the footer (footer fetish? lol). Odd, I know but it really does frame the case with a nice shadow effect. The two concepts were just incompatible.

pixel · Post by **pixel** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 11:36 am

The case looks very beautiful.. It seems very cleanly-done, with very good fitting pieces. And I just love the look of wood..

The final photo puts it in better perspective; it's smaller than I thought when I saw the first pictures. Very well done indeed

(By the way, does the fuel cap have a function? I mean, does turning it etc. do anything?)

Moogles · Post by **Moogles** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:25 pm

Awesome.

The craftsmanship and design are superb. Not sure about noise, but inside such a thick, wooden enclosure, I'm sure it's perfectly manageable. The one thing I don't like are the ports and jacks on the front. It makes the case immediately recognizable as a computer, whereas in my opinion a large part of the appeal from a case like this comes from not knowing what it is. "Nice, uh... humidor? Radio? Alarm clock? Robot vacuum cleaner?" etc.

Another comment I would like to make is that if the case had higher end hardware installed, i.e. a mini ITX AM2 motherboard with HDMI out for example, it would be even more impressive and immediately raise the interest of people looking for a HTPC.

All in all, it's a beauty.

jaganath · Post by **jaganath** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:43 pm

Another comment I would like to make is that if the case had higher end hardware installed, i.e. a mini ITX AM2 motherboard with HDMI out for example, it would be even more impressive and immediately raise the interest of people looking for a HTPC.

have to agree with this, the Nano CPU is very far from the cutting edge in the field, even an Atom-based build would be able to do 720p which I doubt the Nano could do. a mini-ITX AM2 could be undervolted through software to offer much more performance within a similar power budget.

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 1:50 pm

Moogles wrote:Awesome.

The craftsmanship and design are superb. Not sure about noise, but inside such a thick, wooden enclosure, I'm sure it's perfectly manageable. The one thing I don't like are the ports and jacks on the front. It makes the case immediately recognizable as a computer, whereas in my opinion a large part of the appeal from a case like this comes from not knowing what it is. "Nice, uh... humidor? Radio? Alarm clock? Robot vacuum cleaner?" etc.

Another comment I would like to make is that if the case had higher end hardware installed, i.e. a mini ITX AM2 motherboard with HDMI out for example, it would be even more impressive and immediately raise the interest of people looking for a HTPC.

All in all, it's a beauty.

Thank you for your comments. Please let me respond.

I find exactly the opposite is true. Most people don't like being fooled. What people DO like is solving puzzles and the ports are there to engage a viewer's reasoning. The satisfaction of solving a riddle is IMHO much better than a "Gotcha".

As far as performance...it depends on your definition of performance. The new VIA Nano processor idles at 100mW....that's milliwatts yet at the same time has 4 times the performance of the VIA C7. Not every computer a person owns has to be high performance, that's like criticizing that someone's pickup truck won't go 150 mph.

Ingraham was not designed to be an HTPC. It's sole purpose in life is to help VIA debut their new Nano processor at CES in Las Vegas next month.

Thank you for your opinions and please take no offense. I appreciate your post.

QuietOC · Post by **QuietOC** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 2:03 pm

slipperyskip wrote:The new VIA Nano processor idles at 100mW....that's milliwatts yet at the same time has 4 times the performance of the VIA C7.

That is actually important--at least if the rest of the components are similarly frugal.

My $20 Sempron LE-1250 should be able to idle very low, but my 740G motherboard has 3 VRM phases (to support 95W TDP chips) and only allows setting the voltage to a minimum of "0.800V". It runs fine at 1.6GHz at that voltage setting, so it should be able to run on a lot less voltage at the minimum 800MHz clockspeed. Even with those limitations the Sempron is in spitting distance of my Atom netbook as far as power use. The two fans in your system leads me to believe the new VIA platform is not even in the same league.

kittle · Post by **kittle** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 2:12 pm

Wonderful looking case!

My only complaint is that my fileserver WATX board wont fit inside one...

I love the wood look as well but affording the time of a real craftsman to design a custom case is out of my reach.

andyb · Post by **andyb** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 3:30 pm

Got to love the sleeping man statuette, that in the refection of a piece of art is art in itself. Art with art reflected in art, confusing but true.

http://www.valorifussell.com/i/fig_thinkingMan_l.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thinker

Can you tell us what the total power draw at idle and load is, and also please tell us what the AC/DC PCB and power brick that you used are.

I can see where you got some of your design inspiration from.

http://www.antiqueradios.com/gallery/v/ ... 1.jpg.html

Andy

slipperyskip · Post by **slipperyskip** » Thu Dec 04, 2008 5:16 pm

Thanks kittle and andyb!

In the reflection is my A. Santini sculpture of The Thinker by Rodin. He show's up now and then in my project photos.

The power supply is the one that came with the case. It has the name "Daystar" printed on it. The brick is an M & P 12V - 5A unit.

I may need to use a pico PSU when I install the video card. Ingraham is going to Vegas with onboard video only mostly because of damage risks to a riser-mounted video card. Onboard video is DX9 BTW.

Possible shipping damage is also why you see that huge red blower bracket. That blower is going no where...believe it. Three 2-inch wood screws are driven into it from the bottom which also has a support plate directly below the bracket. Lessons learned.

That's a good photo. I used these two for inspiration:

hybrid2d4x4 · Post by **hybrid2d4x4** » Sat Mar 14, 2009 9:00 pm

Sorry for the necro-threading, but having only stumbled across this now, I just want to say that looks absolutely amazing! Hats off for that attention to detail and quality of craftsmanship! If you were able to get by running it passive (or if the coolers turn out to be extremely quiet), this would be a great music server in a high-end setup that uses similarly retro-themed turntables, etc.