2006 Nostalgia Rig

Lee989 · December 4, 2019

Hi everyone! Since i've just started to look into building a budget rig a whole decade after I last built a PC I thought i'd share in my little nostalgia trip. Please note all these images were taken on a dirt cheap Fuji digital camera or worse a mobile phone (don't forget it was 2006). They are pretty bad quality, small and i've had to crop some of them heavily (I never took them with the intention of sharing online).

Just to set the scene, I was fresh out of school, working 12 hour factory shifts for £3/hr saving what I could to build myself my first PC. It took me months of saving up but I eventually had enough to place my parts order. I'd never spent so much money in one go and I still remember spending literally hours staring at the checkout cart convincing myself to press the buy button. Obviously I did it in the end, otherwise this would be a very boring post indeed.

There's some additional parts I bought from other vendors like a CPU cooler, cables and a fan controller, but only this vendor would show me my order history going so far back. I believe the total build cost was around the £600 mark.

Parts delivered, I was clearly too excited to take a bundle shot, but I did find a shot of the CPU and Mobo. I still have all the boxes for this build in my parents attic.

So what are we putting all this gear into you might be wondering? A Thermaltake Soprano? A Coolermaster Storm?! Possibly one of those aluminium Lian-Li cases that were super light weight?...

None of those! I had this

Of course I wasn't going to leave it like that. I didn't really know what I was going to turn it into, but I was young, had zero DIY skills, no workshop, and the key's to my dads toolbox. Who wouldn't decide to wing it on a custom case modding project!

My rough idea was to flatten the side panels, put in a window, add some lights and transfer a decal of space gas cloud I had an odd obsession with at the time. So let's get started!

Step 1 was to flatten the right side panel. This should have been the easiest job. Fill it, sand it and paint it. Because the impression was only a couple millimeters deep I decided to opt for a spray on filler.

That was an absolutely stupid idea. A couple of millimeters might not sound like a lot, but it took 1 and half tins of spray on filler and 2 days of spraying and drying cycles to build it up. Oh and to top it off, it never turned fully solid for sanding. It kept this rubbery texture. I assume the spray can fillers are meant for scratch filling...

Anyway, after trying to sand it down and the filler just clogging the sand paper or coming off in chunks. I grabbed a metal scraper and removed the lot. Car body filler it is!

Filled and sanded down that was one panel complete. It was far from perfect, but by this point i'd spend days on one panel and I just wanted to move on. A few of the perforated air holes in the bottom right corner do show in the final product, but it wasn't too noticeable.

Next up we have the left side panel. Didn't get too many images of this, must have been too busy playing with power tools. So unfortunately this action shot is all you're getting.

Finally we have the front face. I decided I wanted to swap the power buttons for some light up push to make switches, so back out comes the filler so we can flatten everything off. This time I'd learned from my mistakes, so I used the car body filler to do the majority of the filling, then a light coat of the spray to fill in some imperfections after i'd done the first pass of sanding.

I knew airflow was a thing, so I knew I had to make some holes for some front intake fans. I decided to just follow the contours of the front panel and settled on a pair of eyes.

Back out with the Dremel and we're all done and ready for the paint.

Now the original idea was to place a decal on the right panel. I'd purchased some transfer paper, and printed out a test sheet to make sure I had it sized perfectly. I'd edited the image to remove the black background (since the case was black) so you have to imagine the white paper would be transparent.

As it turned out, the image didn't really work. The blues and greens were very dull when printed and I scraped the idea. The right side wouldn't be on show anyway, i'd had my parts for over a week and it was itching to get this thing up and running. So the case get's reassembled, parts put in and booted up.

Unfortunately I didn't get any images of putting the parts in the case. I was probably too worried about messing it all up at this stage, which I did do very spectacularly when on first switch on the case filled with smoke and I poo'd myself. Whilst funny looking back now, you can imagine the horror when I thought I'd somehow blew up my components. As it turned out, I stupidly didn't insulate the bare wire power cables for the button led's on the front which must have caused some arcing as the plastic had melted on the back of the switches. Luckily no serious problems, the led's were gone (and I never got around to fixing them) but pulled the power cables off and it booted up fine.

So here's the final result. Far from refined, loads of imperfections and not very good at cable management but none of that mattered to me. It looked awesome, blew my old PC out the water and lasted me many years. I don't remember ever throwing it away so it's probably buried in my parents attic somewhere. Be interesting to dig it out and see if it still works.