The Coffee Table!!!

The Coffee Table is my second case mod. Following the success of my first mod, The Desk, I decided to continue bringing further functionality to my computers then what the internal components could provide. The idea for this coffee table mod came to me as I was sitting on my couch, playing a competitive game of Halo with my roommate. In a moment of intensity I accidentally knocked over my glass of Coke that I had set carelessly on the rug. I decided it was indeed time to get a coffee table. It then came to me that this piece of furniture could also function to tie my living room into my computer network. A coffee table that would act as a file server, media control for my living room TV, and light entertainment for guests.
For this project I wanted to keep the cost down as low as possible seeing as it did not have to be a high performance computer. To start out I grabbed an old computer case and cut out just what I needed to mount the motherboard. I then went to our local steel yard and grabbed some tubing and sheet metal. I first built a frame to mount my old 15inch LCD in, and then built off of it a little panel for an old Kensington trackball that I had found. Once the upper frame was complete I went about creating a frame for the bottom half. I bought a small TFX power supply to mount at the very bottom and used the main leads to power also the LCD and a auxiliary power socket at the bottom of the case. With both frames done, I welded them together and then skinned them with sheet metal. The rear panel is removable, and as a final touch I tore apart an old 5” 4 gig drive and gave it a Plexiglas window to display through the case.
The system requirements are the best, but it works perfectly for its purpose:
Pentium D 930
54mbps Belkin wireless
Asus P5PL2
Radeon x1300
400gb Western Digital HD
4gb OCZ 6400 Platinum
The total cost of the project was about $75, and a big part of that was in wire for my welder and cutting wheels. Except for the power supply and motherboard most of the components come second hand when I upgraded my other mod, The Desk!!!

This is “The Desk!!!”

The idea was originally conceived as a solution to my lack of furniture and a decent computer. Unlike the modifications most computer users make to their case, for The Desk I focuses on the case being more than something pretty to look at. The computer components are house inside the surface of the desk, viewed through a thick piece of Plexiglas. Custom monitor mounts attach directly to the frame of the table, leaving the entire systems footprint comparable to many laptops.

Despite this The Desk features:

2x Ultra 550w Power supply
Intel Q6600 2.4 @ 3.5
4 × 2gb Corsair DDR2 Memory
HIS HD2900 XT 512mb
SB X-Fi Elite Pro
Hard Drives – 150gb WD Raptor
2× 500gb WD in Raid 0
320gb Seagate
250gb WD

In addition to the internal Hard drive The desk features a special mount with a separate, detachable hard drive cluster called “The Tower!!!” This was done to allow the hard disks to be shut off individually and only used when needed. Across 5 disks (with room for 1 more) this gives The Desk an extra 1.9 Terabytes, making the grand total 3.62TB.

The Desk was made completely from scratch, mostly square steel tubing, and steel plating from our local steel yard. I have no idea how much it weighs. Most likely well over 500lbs.