My DIY A4000 tower

[Secret Vampire]

I just thought I'd post some pictures I took as I was reassembling my A4000 after repairing the audio circuit (hopefully anyway, not tested it yet)

Attached images show
1. The case with just the motherboard/daughterboard/prometheus installed
2. Case with drive cradle and PSU (ATX rewired with A4000 style plug, and seperate wires to route the ATX power signal through a latching switch in the place of the original power switch on the case.)
3. Case with side panel and top bracing piece installed, the top just slides off for easy Zorro access, note that there's enough space to use the Prometheus in the top zorro slot, the other card is a comp serv flicker fixer.
4. Rear panel, showing DIY bracket, and rear ports for network and graphics cards installed in the Prometheus.
5. Front panel, showing that I should have mounted the motherboard a bit higher in the case in order to fit a floppy drive below the zorro daughterboard, I quite like having front mounted ports for mouse and joystick though.

Some technical details

The case originally housed an Intel built Pentium pro server, I bought it just because it was wide enough to fit the normal desktop backplane and the Prometheus without sacrificing zorro slots. for some reason intel chose to build it upside down, with drive bays at the bottom and card slots at the top, as you can see, that works out really well for mounting the A4000 board, as it means that the cards aren't upside down. I had to cut away the rear bracket for the PC cards, and replace it with one made from sheet aluminium, which also supports the zorro daughterboard, and drill new holes for the motherboard mounting standoffs (I got 8 out of the 9 to line up ).
The case is amazingly well designed, the sides and top are plastic and held in place without screws, and all the steel parts are nice and solid.
The downside, apart from not being able to fit an internal floppy, without adapting one of the 5.25" bays, are that, while it all fits with the a3640, there isn't much clearance, you can see how I've had to chop some pins off the heatsink in order to fit a CD drive in the top bay in the first pic. I fear that with a different accelerator I'll have to remove some of the drive cradle to accommodate it, further restricting what I can fit in there. Though, I can't see an immediate need for an additional optical drive, and 3.5" units should still be mountable without much problem.
I would also like to get a fan at the top-front of the case, but the clearance is too limited with Zorro cards installed for a regular 80mm fan, I need to either find a thin one, or use several smaller ones.

[keropi]

heh, a little ugly but functional!

good