Planing The Franken-puter

Some of you may remember the Pinncacle Stream-Genie "portable" computer that I scored a few months ago. This machine is one of the oddities of the computing world variously called "lunchbox", "luggables", or maybe even "portable desktops". They are essentially a bunch of desktop-spec components put into a semi-custom (they don't sell very many of them) case designed for specific functions. Their work tended toward the esoteric; ranging from "port-sniffing", to weapon control for the military. As notebook computers have become increasingly powerful, their already small market share has gotten even smaller! So, they are rare with a capital "R"! However, they are interesting though. A lot of which has to do with the fact that they use largely "off-the-shelf" desktop components. 

So much so, that when you pull all this stuff out of the box, you end up with the inside of an ATX case. OK; granted that you have an LCD attached to the "bottom" of it, and that it's a really small case! However, it's never-the-less, still a full-sized ATX case. 

On one side, you have mounting for an ATX pattern power supply and a full, 7 expansion slots.

On the other side, are drive cages for normal 3.5" and 5.25" drives; 2 of each. There is also an area for an intake fan covered by a grill. 

 .... and on the other side of the "floor" past the 15" LCD is a fold-out keyboard, complete with a touchpad. This connects via a pass-through to the back where there's a double PS/2 connector for the motherboard's I/O panel. The LCD display has the same arrangement in the form of the familiar HD15 "VGA" connector that you can see in the first side image above.

So, it took me a little while to get all this out of there! This machine was a highly specialized, extremely expensive tool used for onsite video streaming back when processors weren't powerful enough to do the work via software, so there were several expansion cards with LOTS of chips on them to do this work in "hardware". This was quite a computer in it's day!  What am I planing to do with it?

 

I'm thinking maybe a portable gaming machine! What!?! Yes, I'm aware that I'm not much of a gamer..... well, actually, I'm not any kind of a gamer, but still..... it's really a cool idea if you think about it! So, here's the plan: 

• Install a motherboard capable of taking a modern enough chip that can run real (non-Minecraft) games.
• Move the power supply from above the I/O area which is coincidentally where the CPU and it's heatsink/cooler sits to the other side of the case. The drive side of the case has an area for a fan that's a perfect fit for SFX sized PSU.
• Replace all the drives with modules that will allow me the greatest amount of flexibility. Icy Dock makes some nice ones.
• Install a recent, but cool-running graphics card such as the nVidia GTX 750 that would be capable of running modern games at playable fps.

 

Although this "works-in-progress" project will end up being a blog series as I acquire parts for it, I am OK to show you this since I bought it already. It's the Gigabyte H81M-S2PV LGA-1150 Micro-ATX motherboard that I recently picked up off of the local Craigs List for $35. Many of you will recognize that although, it's the new mainstream CPU socket, the H81 will indicate that it's the "low-end" chipset, incapable of the finer points of gaming hardware such as over-clocking. There are a few other cheap-o features as well, such as 2 RAM sockets, only 4 SATA ports of which only 2 are 6Gbp/s, and not even an internal USB 3.0 header! AND what's with the 2 PCI expansion slots vs. only 2 PCI-e expansion slots (only one of which is 16x)! But really! How much do you figure I'll try to cram into this thing anyway!

OK..... let's start with this.... it's I/O panel. While you're looking at the fact that there's only 2 USB 3.0 ports on it, you might have missed that there 2 PS/2 ports. Yup, that particular feature is scarce as hen's teeth dating back to the LGA1155/56 boards, but on a board for a Haswell CPU!?! Perfect for my situation though since I have that passthrough for the attached KB/Mouse! Although the case will take a full-sized ATX board, it's still pretty tight in there, so the compact Micro-ATX 9.6" x 7.1" board will give me a little breathing room in there! Yes, I know that it doesn't have much in the way of features, but I'm not looking to make this into an every day user or ultimate "fragger". The idea of this machine is so that it's capable of doing mainstream gaming on a portable platform, not to make it the best thing ever!  I am excited though. Roughly, I'll install a decent sized SSD to run the OS, and eventually a video card that won't embarrass itself, but I'm not going to stuff it full of gear that I won't use or need in a rig like this. Stay tuned. This is liable to get interesting!