My first PC
This is my very first start-from-scratch project and definitely one of the most fun ones. I put together my first own PC myself during my last school years (11th to 13th grade). I made the casing from a blue plastic box, which I found in a local hardware store. At that time it took me ages to built that system, because every single part of this PC was financed by pocket money and distributing newspapers.
The nice thing about making the case myself was, that it wasn't the same kind of grey tower, you could buy everywhere. The box had also handles, which made it easily portable, a few years before notebooks / laptops became a common thing. I sawed out the openings for drives, power supply, fans, extension cards and connectors and I drilled holes for all the screws, buttons and LEDs. I took the drive mounts and the back from an old PC case to keep the drives and extension cards in position.
Since it was around 2001 to 2003, the specs where pretty minimal compared to todays computers. At that time it was a little above mediocre, but all I could ever dream of: Some affordable ASRock board, an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ CPU, 80GB(?) hard drive, 512MB RAM (later 1GB), 300W power supply, HIS Radeon-AGP card with 128MB RAM(?), CDRW drive and DVDRW drive, floppy drive and a regulatable Artic cooling CPU-Fan + some more housing fans. But the best thing for me was, the PC was glowing blue in the dark. All of the fans had blue LEDs, including the CPU fan and I put two blue glowing rods behind drives and power supply, so every side would spend a wonderful shiny blue light.
The box case had one design flaw though: it was made of plastic and without stabilizers. Carrying it around, the box itself moved and so did the internal parts. That eventually caused the AGP port to get loose contacts. Nevertheless, I used it for four to five years before finally upgrading to a new PC and I still like to think of the times when I programmed on it or took it to friends houses for game nights.
OK, enough of the talking, here are some pictures:
