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.

Cabinet Computer Update

The cabinet computer project is progressing. Phase one, the Magic Jack computer is up and running 24/7 on it's own. It's an ITX energy efficient board running a Celeron 1.2 Ghz cpu with 1 gb of ram.
The initial build of this computer had it running an 8 gb Compact Flash card as it's primary drive running windows XP. Testing found the Compact Flash card was too slow for efficient operation. After searching the web for a high speed Compact Flash card, I found it cheaper to buy a 16 gb Solid State Drive off of Ebay. Windows 7 installed smoothly on the board.
My goal was to have an an energy efficient board to run 24/7 to support my Magic Jack telephone interface. It does that job and also makes a good web surfing computer.
Phase two of the cabinet project will find a UBTX board being installed in the cabinet. Due to it being so different from the typical ATX or MATX board, this board has been named Frankenzilla. Stay tuned to future posts on this install.

Busy building here

I've been keeping very busy. Though twice retired I've taken a job with an electronics design firm. Right now it is part time. Though I will end up full time within the next couple months. Guess I'm destined to be a workaholic.
The building projects here are continuing. The past few days have been spent reconfiguring the home office. The cabinet computer project is progressing slowly. Thus far it contains an energy efficient itx board running a somewhat slow but efficient Celeron processor. It's life revolves around keeping my Magic Jack phone working 24/7.
I managed to get sidetracked from the cabinet project long enough to build up another ITX Intel Atom dual core computer. My last one was sacrificed to get Meg a green computer going in Toronto. This mini computer runs extremely well. I built this one a bit different than the last one. It is powered by a 12 VDC power source using a DC power supply board from mini.box.com. This eliminates having a heat generating power supply inside the computer case. Additionally this was my first venture using a Solid State Drive vice the more conventional hard drive. A future post will detail this project with pictures.
Still on the bench is a UBTX board that will be home to a Pentium four 3 ghz processor. This board will be built in the computer cabinet.
I also have a dual core board and processor awaiting a build.
So will be busy over the next few weeks. Keep following for detailed posts on all of these builds as well as projects I have in the making.