Introduction:

Who have not heard of the VIA EPIA platform? God! Where the hell have you been dude? Heheh! Of course, you probably know that there's already tons of mods out there using these tiny mobos, some chose to build their own cases around the motherboards while others simply chucks the poor motherboard is places you wouldn't even imagine! Not that kinda place though... :O) Anything from model cars, toasters, clocks, etc just to name a few have been used to house the mobo. A lot of peeps will say that the mobo's ain't that powerful to run your day to day games but it's the perfect candidate if you're building a second system just for browsing or doing office work. Heck! It's powerful enough to be your Divx or MP3 station! Plus, it's modding! And anything to do with modding is good business with me! :O) Having build my own custom case before (Project Black Qube), I have a rough idea on how to do it now and what kinda material to use. But while the Black Qube was primarily a gaming rig, this time, I wanted to make some sort of a rig for surfing, office work, MP3/Divx and also duplicating machine. No gaming since we all know what the mobo can't do! :O)

The mobo	933MHz	Tiny eh?
I/O Ports	The CPU	1 DDR Ram Slot up to 1GB

The Motherboard

I chose the M9000 EPIA as it has a more powerful 933MHz processor and also an MPEG-2 encoder for DVD playback. It has a single PCI expansion slot but with all the features available on the mobo itself, it's hard to see if anyone would use it. Maybe if an AGP slot was there instead.. hhmm... USB ports speeds has been bumped to the 2.0 specs and IEEE 1394 aka Firewire are also included in this new model. All these improvements on the same 17cmx17cm footprint of the original EPIA Mini-ITX mobos. Outstanding! If you need more details on the motherboard, look it up here at VIA's website. Of course, by the time you read this, the new 1.0GHz EPIA based on the Nehemiah Core is already available. It features a lot of improvements over the older 1.GHz EPIA. Here's an excellent review of it over at Mini-ITX.Com if you want more information.

The Case Design

I thought of many different ideas for the case designs at this stage but I wanted to get away from the squarish look of the Project Black Qube altogether. And while talking to my buddy Calvin about it (he was also thinking of a case design for his own custom rig), he gave me an idea of an outer and inner shell for the case. The outer shell would just be a cover for the case with no real modification or work done to it. The inner shell would be the part where all the hardwares would be located. He wanted to build a slim case but with the hardwares that I had in hand, no way a slim case would be able to house all of them so I basically "modified" his idea and came up with what you're about to see here.

The outer shell

Frontal view

The joint

With back panel

Close up on the curved part

The outer shell would have this curved or bend edges but without the proper tools, I couldn't do this myself so I had the acrylic store to help me fabricate the outer shell. I chose to use the tinted or smoked acrylic for the shell. If you wanna do the bending yourself, you can find a good acrylic bending article here at Bit-Tech. The outer shell is basically a flat piece of acrylic sheet, bend at 4 corners and joined up at each end. The store did a pretty good job with the bend and joint too. Now I have the outer shell ready so it's time to work on the innards.