Cold Winter: Part 1

Cold Winter was my second project, which went through three different versions, all with different hardware and cooling. In part 1 of this buildlog I will go through how I built the first version of Cold Winter.

I started this project around the same time as I was finishing up The Red One. It was even built by spareparts from The Red One.

So with the same acrylic as I used for The Red One I used for this build too. Together with this U-shape acrylic piece and some bent steel-plates I had the base for the case.

Next thing I did was to cut out a hole for a 120mm in the front as well as a hole for a 4×20 LCD. Backplate also got a cutout for the I/O-plate and 92mm fan.

Here are some photos that actually have not been showed before, and yes, this build was housing a Micro-ATX motherboard and a ATX power-supply in the beginning. But that was changed out to Mini-ITX pretty quickly.

However, the backplate and frontplate was painted white as I wanted this build to look “Cold”.

This is also a bit interesting. At first I was using this old 4×20 LCD that I had to configure and solder the controller for my self. It was then installed to the PC via the parallel port. However, it was all too bulky so I changed it out to a more compact one with the controller chip already soldered on and installed via USB instead.

The Micro-ATX motherboard was changed out to a Mini-ITX one which used a external power-supply. Motherboard was mounted on stand-off screws. This was also the first time I used a SSD, a Intel X-25 40GB one! The SSD was mounted with double-sided tape and also got a white cover-plate.

Cables for the SSD and HDD was sleeved with white and light blue.

A power-switch with white LED was installed in the front and the cable sleeved together with the cable from the LCD.

Both the SSD and HDD got coverplates in white and was installed to one of the sides. I also used sounddampening material to cover the bottom and inside of the front as they were white.

I also installed some white LEDs in the bottom of the case to light up the inside. This was everything for this time, in part 2 I will show you how I built the version 2 of Cold Winter.