Macintosh Classic Gaming PC - Another restomod!

[Nev]

Following on from my Restomod TV build, this week I picked up my next project- an old Macintosh PC. Picked up the shell from eBay for £20, not perfect but good enough.


The plan was to build myself a new as my old one is a bit haggard and, well, old. Unfortunately I got a bit carried away with the specs.

• MSI B75IA-E33 Mini ITX motherboard
• Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz processor
• MSI GTX 750 Ti 2GB GDDR5 graphics card
• Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM
• Kingston V300 240GB SSD
• Be Quiet Pure Power L8 350W power supply
• Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler
• Arctic Cooling F12 120mm fan
• China special 8" LCD display

A few days after my bank account was cleaned out (it's not like real money when you buy stuff over the internet, is it?) this lot appeared at my door:


I'd already figured out before that the Mini ITX board would fit in the shell, so out came the deremel.



The graphics card is pretty good, but when I unpacked it, I never really thought about how big it would be.


Turns out it's about 50mm longer than the mobo! Oops. I had planned to run the mobo a bit away from the back so i could route the VGA cable for the screen inside but that wasn't going to happen now! Out came the dremel again. It now JUST fits, the front case just rests against the fan cowling.



Next was the PSU, again it was a perfect fit between the top case and the vent on the back.




After putting the huge CPU cooler on there and fitting the SSD (taped to the right of the screen, if you can spot it) Slotted it all together. Amazingly lucky and very tight fit!


After running it for a bit, installing Win7 (I might go Win8 but the disc wasn't working at the time) I did a quick benchmark test;


Yep, that's fast! Should be plenty fast enough to run minesweeper in 1080p.

As you can imagine it will get pretty hot in there once the big screen hole is filled, so I added a 120mm exhaust fan to help it along.


And here is how it stands now, with a decent picture of the inside!




Next step is to fit the screen, fit some on/off switches and generally tidy it up a bit with a bit of trim round the back. I was thinking about painting the whole thing satin black but i'm not sure yet. The main thing with painting it is that I really can't be bothered to dismantle it again! Ha.

That's it for now, i'm waiting for the screen to arrive from Shenzhen, China then I need to figure out where to mount the VGA controller board that goes with it.

[Bolf]

wow , awesome

[chairchild]

might be worthwhile adding a bit more subtle venting in front of the GPU? Right now it's kinda blowing everything straight into a wall - with only a couple of those tiny slots for venting.

Some sort of "plain" mesh, but painted cream, to blend in maybe?


This is actually more powerful than all the laptops in my house put together

[g40jon]

That is the most cool thing i've seen all day! Loved the tv build, this looks like it will be just as good!

[devilishdesigner]

Great fun. side vent needs to be colour coded, but overall looks great.

[106e30]

Now that is cool. Wicked idea, well done

[Nev]

Aug 11, 2014 17:43:53 GMT chairchild said:

might be worthwhile adding a bit more subtle venting in front of the GPU? Right now it's kinda blowing everything straight into a wall - with only a couple of those tiny slots for venting.

Some sort of "plain" mesh, but painted cream, to blend in maybe?


This is actually more powerful than all the laptops in my house put together

Yeah, i thought about that but I've had it running for ages playing games and it hasn't got even remotely hot in there, so we'll see how it performs with the screen in. I'm on the look-out for some paint that is a similar colour to the body for the vent, but i haven't found any yet! So for now it stays black...

More progress:

Got some switches through from eBay, stainless steel momentary switches with LEDs in them. One is power (blue), one is loading/reset (red).



Then a few short days later the screen arrived from China, impressed considering it wasn't due to arrive until the end of the month. Pretty good fit too.


Next up I started thinking about the best way to mount it. Originally I was going to get the font panel machined flat but looking at it, there isn't much of a curve on it so out came the hair dryer for a bit of bending.


Amazingly, it worked really well!


So the screen itself. It's an 8" LED monitor that runs up to 1024x768. Not sure what its from but it comes with a separate board form controlling it which has a VGA input and 2 AV inputs. Unfortunately it is also powered by a 12v DC in, like a laptop charger. Not wanting to have another power in just for the screen, I got the multi meter out and figured out that hard drives are also powered by 12v, so with a little fiddling.



Awesome. So glad that this worked and because it only supplies power when the computer is turned on it works perfectly. Don't worry, i didn't just leave the wires twisted together, i soldered them up and put some heat shrink on.


The last bit was mounting the screen. As its a bit smaller, it requires some kind of surround. So with a little tape and some black paint from behind...



And then sticking the screen on, well, there is a bit of a gap at the top and bottom so i had another think, and came up with using the foam from the packaging from the graphics card. With a bit of shaping, it gave the perfect mounting surface.


And finally, here it is!




I hope you enjoyed it. Only bits left to do is to use it and work out where on earth i'm going to put it!

[chairchild]

looks better than I could've imaged! Sod painting the grille now, it looks rather good as it does now

[Sammo]

Haha that looks so cool! Well done

[cianha]

Great build! love how tidy everything is in there. I see you've another video output for a larger screen too, so you've covered all the bases!

[waveman1500]

Another very nice project! How are you locating this in your house? Does it sit next to the TV or on a desk? I think it would look weird without a corded keyboard and mouse connected to it. Very cool though.

[MrSpeedy]

I have literally no idea what you have done there, but it looks very well done, and more importantly, cool as hell!

[optimusprime]

Aug 16, 2014 0:24:05 GMT MrSpeedy said:

I have literally no idea what you have done there, but it looks very well done, and more importantly, cool as hell!

Glad it's not just me then!


But I agree it does look great.

[Nev]

Cheers! Its come out better than I could have hoped for and it was just one of those things where everything just comes together nicely, almost by accident sometimes.

I have been playing round with the desktop today to make it look more apple-y.


That's using a dock program called Nexus and hiding everything else like start menu and desktop icons. Looks alright really! I did have it sat next to the TV but it looked a bit wrong, so I've moved it onto a bookshelf. Really what needs to happen is that I need to buy a bigger house, i'm running out of room!

[thetechden]

Awesome project again dude, I really need to pull my finger out and get some of mine on here. Still haven't finished my TV one yet.

[Nev]

Aug 15, 2014 15:03:21 GMT waveman1500 said:

Another very nice project! How are you locating this in your house? Does it sit next to the TV or on a desk? I think it would look weird without a corded keyboard and mouse connected to it. Very cool though.

You can just spot it in it's current location on the bookshelf, actually a pretty good fit. This was me fitting a new engine to my girlfriend's C50 last night.

Aug 15, 2014 10:04:54 GMT cianha said:

Great build! love how tidy everything is in there. I see you've another video output for a larger screen too, so you've covered all the bases!

And yep, I can run it on a TV for gaming, haven't tried it yet but hoping to be able to use it as a readout for gears/stuff like that when on racing sims. Or maybe a rear view mirror?

Aug 16, 2014 14:39:11 GMT thetechden said:

Awesome project again dude, I really need to pull my finger out and get some of mine on here. Still haven't finished my TV one yet.

Get on it! Need to see it!

[devilishdesigner]

Brilliant, wish there was a kit for this sort of thing, retroteching certain old cases. End result looks great!

[ThePollitt]

That's awesome, and something I'd love to have myself one day.

If you don't mind me asking, how much did it all come to in the end?

Chris

[Nev]

Aug 18, 2014 8:27:06 GMT ThePollitt said:

That's awesome, and something I'd love to have myself one day.

If you don't mind me asking, how much did it all come to in the end?

Chris

As with most things computery, it a;ll depends on the spec of the hardware. The one I built cost a fair amount but that's because I built it to be a pretty high spec gaming machine that will last for many years, the actual case/screen and stuff didn't really cost much. There were also a few bits used left over from the TV, but i'll try factor in prices and link the less obvious stuff. I'll split it into case and hardware

Case: £20 ebay
Screen: £57.67 ebay
On/reset switches: £11.98 ebay
On/reset cables for the motherboard: £2.34 ebay
270 degree VGA cable: £3.02 ebay
Short VGA cable: £3.49 ebay
3m double sided tape: £5 ebay
Perspex: £2.50 ebay
Molex hard drive to fan adaptor (for powering the screen): £1.19 ebay
120mm fan filter: £2.79 ebay
120mm Arctic cooling fan: £4.49 ebuyer
Satin black paint and some masking tape: £5 halfrauds

Case total: £119.47

MSI B75IA-E33 mini ITX motherboard: £45.50 ebuyer
Intel Core i5 3570K 3.4GHz processor: £171.48 ebuyer
MSI GTX 750 Ti graphics card: £114.99 ebuyer
Corsair Vengeance 16GB RAM: £122.10 ebuyer
Kingston 240GB SSD: £77.66 ebuyer
Be Quiet 350w power supply: £34.98 ebuyer
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 cpu cooler: £15.06 ebuyer

Hardware total: £588.90

So that makes a grand total of £708.37. Ouch. But look at it this way- to get a similar spec desktop you'd be looking at £700-800, and to get a similar spec laptop, well, that figure would probably be closer to double that. It's not quite as portable as a laptop but it's way more portable than a desktop! In reality, you could build a decent spec computer without the fancy graphics and loads of ram for about a third of that and it would be just fine at the normal every day stuff. I put together a lower spec one below:

MSI H61I-E35-V2/W8 mini ITX motherboard: £37.98 ebuyer
Intel Core i3 3240 3.40GHz processor: £79.98 ebuyer
Corsair 4gb RAM: £31.50 ebuyer
Toshiba 1TB HDD: £41.99 ebuyer
Antec 350w power supply: £34.23 ebuyer

Hardware total: £255.68. Now that isn't bad, it really doesn't need a graphics card unless you plan on playing games, it'll deal with photoshop and such like just fine.

[chairchild]

if I tried to fit an engine in the front room - I think I'd be getting divorce papers in the post