Case Modding And Psu's

[meydrew]

Hey Hak5 forum,

I'm foraying into the world of case modding. I'm a grad student so I decided to build my own home media server instead of buying one that will wind up costing me a fortune for all the functionality I want. I decided to add some pzazz to it and make it even more fun by case modding it.

My goal is to fit it all into the body of a toy truck pictured in the attachment and not spend more than $250.

I've decided to go with an AMD FUSION board with a fan-less design, On sale at my local Big Box store for $130. I decided to cannibalize a case on sale for $25 that included a 300 watt PSU.

(Here's where my post title comes to play) the casing around the actual pcb for the PSU is huge (overly large). I was wandering, if I were to rehouse the PSU in a smaller isolated case, that will fit in my modded case. What should be my primary concerns for rehousing? air flow? electrical grounding? PSU Temp?

I look forward to reading your responses

[Keltha]

Electrical grounding is a must, if the new case is metal, it MUST be grounded properly. You could probably skimp a little on the airflow as you're probably not going to be using that much power, but make sure air can flow in and out.

[meydrew]

Thanks Keltha.

I'm playing with a few ideas at the moment.I definitely want it to remain grounded. One of them is to just mod the original psu housing and replace the incredibly large fan. Another avenue would be to bump the price ceiling to $275 and purchase a pico psu or a flex ATX psu. These last options are far less fun but they are still being considered. Do you think that swapping the fan and repositioning it would cause a lot of issues?

Electrical grounding is a must, if the new case is metal, it MUST be grounded properly. You could probably skimp a little on the airflow as you're probably not going to be using that much power, but make sure air can flow in and out.