building a pc on a wooden board...

xirokx · 17 Jan 2009 at 18:11

Hi,

I have some wooden boards I would like to place the mobo on and build a pc on the board, this will be purely for testing parts and therefore must be a working system...

I have a few questions:-

- do I have to mount the mobo like in a case? or make holes in the wooden board to screw it straight onto?

- are there any potential shorting possibilites?

- any calamities I could avoid?

Thanks in advance...

ChrisLX200 · 17 Jan 2009 at 18:31

For anything more than brief testing purposes it's a good idea to put upstands in the wood (not that easy really). You don't want to be screwing it down onto the wood because you'll distort the board. Some woods can be slightly conductive - there's always some wanter in it - not a problem unless the pins on the underside are pressed into it. Another reason for lifting the board up a bit from the wood. Remember there will be a fair bit of RF interference because the case does the job of shielding - may affect other electronics nearby (TVs, radios, wireless headphones and so on.)

xirokx · 17 Jan 2009 at 22:10

that is valuable advice , advice which I am very grateful for....

I will have to figure out how to now mount the mobo to the board and forunately as it will only be used for purely testing the RF interferance should be a problem, as it will only be used now and then...

Any ideas how I can mount the PSU, DVDrw and HDD on? in a way that disconnecting them would be easy to test other PSU's, DVD rw and HDD's..

ChrisLX200 · 17 Jan 2009 at 22:30

They don't really need to be mounted as such, unless you're moving it around. A bit of high-strength Velcro can be attached to any component you'll use a lot. People seriously into distributed computing (seti@home, folding@home, climate prediction etc.) make processor 'farms' with motherboards screwed to tiers of wooded boards like this. These are semi-permanent arrangements and the method works perfectly well. Glad I'm not paying the electric bill though...

xirokx · 18 Jan 2009 at 01:41

thanks...

so thats stand ups for the mobo and anything else velcro...didnt think of the velcro having done so its a great idea...

are you insinuating this method will increase my electricity bills? or do you mean those people with processor farms only have that problem?

ChrisLX200 · 18 Jan 2009 at 02:04

Those with the processor farms, I just run 1 machine 24/7 (plus a lot of addons) and my bill is a fright. Those with 10 processors running 24/7 must get free electricity is all I can say.