FrankenZilla Prep Work

This project was named Frankenzilla because of the unusual nature of the mother board being used. It is a socket 775 UBTX board. A few months ago I had never seen a UBTX board. My buddy Rick bought a couple of them for $20 or so from one of the liquidators. The unusual thing about a UBTX board is they are essentially laid out the opposite of a conventional ATX motherboard. Additionally they require a rather unique and hard to find CPU heat sink, fan and duct assembly. Building a UBTX board in a computer case is out of the question as the cases are hard to find and extremely expensive when you can find a used one.
Knowing all of this I'm sure you are asking "Why use this unusual board?" The answer is simple. Rick gave me one of the boards. He built his on the wall of his workshop and it works well. So I was compelled to put mine into service.
Other than it's obvious physical differences from more standard motherboards, this Asus UBTX board has similar specifications to most of the socket 775 motherboards out there.
After my initial look at the board, it was apparent that the biggest challenge would be CPU cooling. Wanting to mount the board in my Computer cabinet project, keeping the CPU cool would be more of a challenge since I wouldn't have the well engineered air flow plan that you get when using a typical computer case. Along with the board Rick sent me a Heat sink fan duct assembly that wouldn't fit the board. The duct was trashed, but the large heat sink and fan were salvaged. After a few days of looking at the parts laying here and a trip to the hardware store I came up with the Heat sink fan mounting shown in the picture. It's by no means pretty, but it works.
After powering the board up on the table top I realized there is hope for this board. I let it run for a couple hours monitoring the cpu temperature and found it to stay well within specifications.
Now that I know I have a known good motherboard with adequate CPU cooling I can proceed to add it as my second computer in the computer cabinet. Stay tuned for an update on that phase of the project.