Ghetto Atom Rig

[L2GX]

So a while back I got a 4 digit gas/electricity bill.

There were numerous reasons why I got it, but one of them was working from home with 2 systems running almost 24/7, one big rig for rendering my showreel, one smaller rig for downloading.

Well, that sure changed things. I stopped trying to be selfemployed and got a steady job. I got rid of my backup rig, to stop temptation. I still wanted to get a dedicated download rig, to save money on electricity, but it had to be cheap.

I got it into my mind that I could buy an Atom board + a stick of ram for under 80 euros, then add everything else from parts lying around.
For a case I'd gut a dvd player that hadn't worked in, well, a long time.

So there.





The atom board, old DVD case, an old ATX ups, old dvd writer, and an old sata drive.




Testing the components in a frankensetup, I found that the hd was running extremely hot.
Luckily I had a heatsink from a nvidia card lying aorund, and a surplus 80mm fan


Speaking of fans, this little whiny bitch is way too annoying:



so off it goes



A standard northbridge heatsink fits the wire clamp.


And it fits on the board:


Now to gut the DVD player. Everything went out, butI put in the new CD-rom before I took snaps.



The board will overlap the cd-rom a bit when installed, so I decided to cut the dvd-burner in half.



FYI: yes, it still works, yes it's very loud, no, I'm not actually using it atm, and I will remove it soonish.

next thing I started preparing for the placement of everything. Mark that the hdd is still bearing it's cooler.




The mobo is going to go in upside down, with a bottom fan blowing air over the new northbridge cooler, pushing it past the dvd and the hdd, across the psu and exiting the case left.



So here I prepare for adding the bottom fan.


Now it's a question of tinsnipping.. nix that, we'll need a dremel.Which I had already lying around, just needed some practice.

We can pretend it's perfect



Now we're getting there...

For those of you who thought cutting a dvd-burner in half was a bad idea, check this out: who needs a custom mini-ITX supply?



trust me, it's worse than it looks.

Now, just so the rig isn't totally ghetto- I was booting with a coin held across the mobo pins- I'm going to make the dvd case power button work.

I did this a little earlier:


And found this beauty:




Even an idiot can make those connections. I therefore mangled the correct mobo connectors, some redundant wires, and a fan connector.

Time to fit it all together:



And it booted!

I now have it hooked up directly to my wrt-54g and control it via remote desktop.
I'll be crossing to ubuntu soonish, but for the moment everything works perfectly.

I'd post pics of the finished product, but:

The case needed more outflow on the left side, next to the psu, and I botched that.
I also bothched the placement of the dvd-drive

So basically one of these days (well, after I move next month and have a basement to hide my activities in) I'll pick up a new case on a fleamarket and update this.

Any questions?

[KlaymenDK]

After you've, um, ventilated the PSU and the DVD like that, it's almost a shame to not go on using the coin-operated power switch! I had a few laughs reading your post, thanks for that.

Seriously though, it's amazing what can be done with basically pocket fluff and very few new parts. From the photos it looks as if you went back to the stock CPU cooler? That's gotta be annoying!

I'm impressed with your ability to fit everything in there, though also a little concerned about potential shorts. I'm not going to mention airflow since you're getting a new case eventually.

[ntavlas]

I like it

I just finished building something very similar (htpc with a twist in main gallery) and I can report that this cooling layout works very well.

What kind of case are you after? I hope you keep the hacked cd player theme.

By the way, the hole I cut for my intake fan is worse though I was too shy to take a picture...

[thejamppa]

but U-rubber around edges and it will look like nice, round professional hole. U-rubber is way to hide poor tinjob... I really like that set-up. Frankensetup.. I need to keep that in mind. Made me laugh ^^

[hybrid2d4x4]

The commentary gave me a few good laughs, thanks! Very resourceful build

[L2GX]

Thanks all. i cut the dvd burner in half mainly for it's 'macgyver' effect, so yeah, this rig is all about the laughs.
I am going to get another dvd player if I can find one, silver so it fits in with my planned home theatre setup (my gf has approved all silver components, yay).

I'll definetely be cutting that with dremel only, should improve the cut quality.

On this case I tried diy honeygrate with a drill, which did not work well nor look good. I also tried shark gills which I stupidly folded to the outside but still looked better. I will try to fold them to the inside next time. I also need a trick to protect the paint job when cutting.

Like I said , the dvd is probably going to go, I'm planning to put an internal to pci usb thingee behind the cd door. So I'll be on the lookout for a dvd player with a hinged door. I'm hoping to find something with a hackable vfd, but odds there are low.

The airflow is completely satisfactory so far, however my hard disk is constant around 56 degrees, and the psu is, well, less than efficient.
I have a hard disk lying ready to pop in once this one starts smartin', but a low power psu is difficult to find.
A real ghetto mod might use scavenged transformers to feed the system, but I'm convinced they would be even less efficient.

I'll prolly post more pics when I get the new case.

[weboweb]

I know this thread is over a month old, but I have to ask:

Were you renting out your render rig as a work-at-home job? I've pondered renting CPU time once or twice. Do the dirty work of setting up a zippy optimised cluster and rent that baby out.

If not what were you up to that required such horsepower on 24/7?

[L2GX]

I've never heard of anyone setting up a render farm for rent, you'd need a high bandwith internet pipe, the necessary business infrastructure (accountants, credit card payment services, etc.) cheap electricity and a lot of redundancy, not to mention the software licences.

You'd be competing with existing companies that pull this off on a more than living room scale.

But it would give you a crack at building server clusters like they were lego blocks...



*sigh*

Basically I was rendering a high resolution version of this. Took me two weeks 24/7 to render everything and layer it together in AE, but the design was work of months with overnight renders and tinkering every night after day job. In the end the two weeks were a rush to get a showreel out to show to a couple of architects.

That said I'm not happy with that showreel and sort of planning to do more finetuning after porting the scenes to Blender.

Coming back to the renderfarm renting, the showreel was to show off to some architects who do their rendering out house.
As I understand it many architects have to do this because their software and expertise focuses on designing buidings (CAD), not the visual representatione thereof.

They need someone who can give an extra 'twist' that appeals to the layman. This goes from simply adding textures and volumetrics to, well, misrepresenting the size (good old fisheye lens).

If I remember correctly professional services ask somewhere around 600 euro per image? And they wanted to see if I could beat that price.

So if you have a render cluster set up AND can port CAD objects to a raytracer, that could be a nice job on the side.

[ryboto]

....

I have that air conditioner!

[L2GX]

I didn't want to give the impression that that render farm is mine, it's what I found doing a GIS and belongs to thisperson