Post Your Cheap/Ghetto Creation

[No1451]

So yeah, any home improvement, car improvement, computer, home theatre setup, ANYTHING that you just went incredibly lazy/cheap on that looks awful but works!



So here's mine, my NAS setup I just finished putting together. It's a cheap AM2+ Asus board running a 4400+ w/1GB of ram, 1x500GB hdd, 1x1.5TB hdd and 4x750GB hdds. It's assembled on a spare Lian-Li motherboard tray with 2 harddrive caddies from my Silverstone TJ09 to contain the hdds and 2 Antec Tricool fans to provide some cooling to the hdds, and a Scythe 1600RPM fan on the old(recycled again) Scythe Infinity cooler. Holding the fans on is a very fashionable rubber band.

My aim was the cheapest possible setup I could manage, not factoring for the recycled parts costs, this came in for $301CAD and has 4.55TB of storage available for use. It just looks like hell!

 

[UltraNEO*]

Hmm.. this looks like an interesting thread.

 

[makisushi]

hehe...I will be watching this thread...

Check this out for inspiration

 

[TheOnlyJon]

There is/was already a thread for this but it only survived for a few days and a few pages...

DIY Project Picture Thread

Coincidentally, I started that thread I hope you see better success, or just post in the older one.

 

[Zaap]

Reposting my Hackinstein creation- a complete working mini Hackintosh built in the motherboard box and running (at the time) 10.5.7.

It featured a 500GB SATA hard drive (mounted in the box with a sling of duct tape), 2GB DDR2 RAM, the Intel D945GCLF2 mobo with dual core Atom 330 (screwed into the box) modified with a Zalman passive chipset heatsink to cool the CPU. All Velcro- attached atop an old 400W PSU.

Rubber bands make excellent fan-mounts (included before I was certain how much heat would be generated inside the box- turned out a fan was unnecessary.)

Built it just for the sheer 'what the heck' of it while waiting for the real miniITX case I had on order. It actually worked pretty well- but cardboard tends to feel mushy after a full day of computer heat, even the very minor amount generated by the Atom and hard drive.

Finally, to amuse my wife, I reassembled everything in "The Basket Case", a $7 straw basket from IKEA, for a kitchen computer:

Notice the stealth 'external' DVD drive.

The setup, with wall-mounted 22" Samsung monitor, speakers, keyboard.

The basket case worked really well, and looked pretty good -all things considered- but then the real case intended for the kitchen system showed up, plus the Mrs. wanted her basket back.

 

[No1451]

Nice! I love that you were running your hackintosh in a box! I actually did the same for 4-5 months, worked fantastic.

How well does XBMC run on that machine?

 

[Zaap]

How well does XBMC run on that machine?

It runs pretty well. When that picture was taken the machine was booted into Windows running XBMC, but mostly we run Plex on the Mac side, which works perfectly. Even though it's a variant of XBMC for Mac, Plex just seems to me a lot more polished and stable.

It's great for background entertainment while in the kitchen.

By the way, just curious, what OS are you running on your NAS? Linux? FreeNAS? OpenFiler? Something else? I assume it's headless?

 

[paolo-]

Needed a chain tensioner for my single speed bike, forged a spoon.

Aluminium foundry, just doesn't look good and works.

Little iPod amp from old pc speakers and an old cassette player.

 

[SchneiderMan]

Reposting my Hackinstein creation- a complete working mini Hackintosh built in the motherboard box and running (at the time) 10.5.7.

WOW lol that a little Ministien!

 

[AppleLover9o]

Reposting my Hackinstein creation- a complete working mini Hackintosh built in the motherboard box and running (at the time) 10.5.7.

It featured a 500GB SATA hard drive (mounted in the box with a sling of duct tape), 2GB DDR2 RAM, the Intel D945GCLF2 mobo with dual core Atom 330 (screwed into the box) modified with a Zalman passive chipset heatsink to cool the CPU. All Velcro- attached atop an old 400W PSU.

Rubber bands make excellent fan-mounts (included before I was certain how much heat would be generated inside the box- turned out a fan was unnecessary.)

Built it just for the sheer 'what the heck' of it while waiting for the real miniITX case I had on order. It actually worked pretty well- but cardboard tends to feel mushy after a full day of computer heat, even the very minor amount generated by the Atom and hard drive.

Finally, to amuse my wife, I reassembled everything in "The Basket Case", a $7 straw basket from IKEA, for a kitchen computer:

Notice the stealth 'external' DVD drive.

The setup, with wall-mounted 22" Samsung monitor, speakers, keyboard.

The basket case worked really well, and looked pretty good -all things considered- but then the real case intended for the kitchen system showed up, plus the Mrs. wanted her basket back.

Curious... how well does Hackintosh work?

I'm strongly considering building a "power house" desktop.

Thanks,
-AL9o

 

[Ryan1524]

That's like a static discharge accident waiting to happen. Please tell me you live in a tropical region. Otherwise you wanna get some ESD protection onto that setup soon. LOL.

 

[Zaap]

Curious... how well does Hackintosh work?

I'm strongly considering building a "power house" desktop.

Thanks,
-AL9o

Works perfectly, so long as you stick with a 100% known-working motherboard, and graphic card. (The two most important things.) Only use SATA drives (IDE can cause trouble). You can use just about any CPU, PSU, RAM and case.

My little Atom system is definitely not a 'power house' but it's dirt cheap. The Mobo and CPU alone are a mere $85.

If you're looking for a powerful machine, SL-ready, about as easy to set up as Hackintoshes get, and relatively cost-effective, then get a Gigabyte P45-UD3P motherboard, a compatible nVidia graphics card, your choice of the other components/case- and follow -to the letter- the LifeHacker Snow Leo guide.

 

[AppleLover9o]

Works perfectly, so long as you stick with a 100% known-working motherboard, and graphic card. (The two most important things.) Only use SATA drives (IDE can cause trouble). You can use just about any CPU, PSU, RAM and case.

My little Atom system is definitely not a 'power house' but it's dirt cheap. The Mobo and CPU alone are a mere $85.

If you're looking for a powerful machine, SL-ready, about as easy to set up as Hackintoshes get, and relatively cost-effective, then get a Gigabyte P45-UD3P motherboard, a compatible nVidia graphics card, your choice of the other components/case- and follow -to the letter- the LifeHacker Snow Leo guide.

Interesting

What do you think of the EFI-X? Useful or is there a free way to do that and have it be the same?

Thanks,
-AL9o

 

[Zaap]

Interesting

What do you think of the EFI-X? Useful or is there a free way to do that and have it be the same?

Thanks,
-AL9o

Not to turn this into another Hackintosh thread, but EFI-X is a great option if you want to be absolutely sure that updates will go perfectly, just like a real Mac. Basically, they've engineered it to emulate the EFI, so that when added to supported motherboards (the UD3P works)anything an update could normally break is hardwired and therefore unbreakable.

On the other hand, if you're willing to do a modest amount of manually making sure the few 'hacks' that are needed are updated or re-added during some (not all) updates, then yes, Boot-132 is the free alternative that works just as well. It's just hands-on compared to "pay $200 for an EFI-X and I never have to think about it". For me, Boot-132 been great- running the latest SL (on my main desktop Hack, not the Atom) and have been running every single update since 10.5.2 with no real problems.