I just got my SB75s back from the finishing shop today with a new shiny coat of chrome.

The plastic front bezel was replaced with a custom front panel from frontpanelexpress. 4mm of unfinished aluminum.
The white paint was stripped from the case using standard paint thinner. The paint just popped right off. It required no scrubbing.
I found the hex bolts at home depot. The power button was salvaged from an old soldam case. The button was of higher quality than the one from the SB75s and better suited.

The entire front bezel was removed from the DVDRW, and the chrome stealth piece is screwed directly into the tray using standard case fan screws.

Another shot of tray ejected. I intentionally did not include an eject button because with a 3rd party driver, my the eject key on my mac keyboard opens the cd rom tray.

Once the new front parts were machined and the paint was stripped from the rest of the case, I dropped the parts off a local metal finishing shop to be sanded, polished and chromed. the total cost of the front parts was about $40, and the finishing shop charged me $125. So, this hasn’t been the cheapest project, but well worth having an extremely rare, one of a kind computer.... but not the fastest by today’s standards. The specs are as follows:
P4 Northwood 3.4ghz (clocks to 3.8 under the Zalman cooler, but is held back by an extremely low max core voltage in the bios)
2 gigs corsair XMS DDR 400
250 Gig SATA maxtor HDD
256MB eVGA 7600 gs AGP
bluetooth/wi-fi pci card

To make room for the Zalman, the SATA drive was relocated behind the DVDRW. I simply screwed the HDD onto a piece of scrap metal and bent it to rest on/fold around the chassis.

Here you can see the top of the zalman cooler.

The modified DVDRW drive. You can see that whole front plastic plate was removed so the drive could fit flush against the computer front plate.

And there we have the Zalman in all it’s glory. The front-top fins were easily trimmed with a pair of scissors to fit the DVDRW. Even with the removal of some of the copper, the Zalman still dropped my northwood by 20 degrees. Even over-clocked all the way up to 3.8ghz, the northwood idles at 40c, and peaks at 50c.

So.... those are my mods.... hope it inspires you to hack up your old case too

Wow. That is one beautiful Shuttle. I’m impressed that you managed to cram that Zalman in there. How are the rest of your temps? I’m going to assume that it’s still pretty quiet.

Jono - 14 November 2006 02:26 AM

Wow. That is one beautiful Shuttle. I’m impressed that you managed to cram that Zalman in there. How are the rest of your temps? I’m going to assume that it’s still pretty quiet.

Thanks. The rest of the temps are good, and yeah, it’s doesn’t generate a lot of noise. I may replace the stcok sunan cooler with an artic cooling part to make things really quiet.

With regard to the DVD drive, can you eject it in the BIOS - say so you can boot off a CD? And do you have a pinhole for the unbent paperclip to eject a stuck disk?

But it looks way cool!

oh balls, you beat me to it!  I’ve got the paint stripped off my case.  My only difference is that I’m cutting small windows and putting mesh in there, to mimic the meshed G case.  And I’m using the standard front panel, going to paint it red.

here is a sidebyside comparison of the sb75s before and after i cut out the back for the larger ICE unit of the SD32G2 that has been transplanted into my chrome box.

I had to modify the front port mounting carriage to fit the SD32G2 ports, and I’ll have to make a new port plate. I’m leaning toward carbon fiber.

That’s freaking sexy, fair play and kudos to you man.

Excellent work for fitting the Zalman in there, d’you find that better than the I.C.E. then?

Beer for you!

That’s freaking sexy, fair play and kudos to you man.

Excellent work for fitting the Zalman in there, d’you find that better than the I.C.E. then?

Beer for you!

Thanks.  Well the Zalman was 20 degress cooler than the smaller 1st gen ICE with a 3.4 northwood. Compared to the 2nd gen ICE, I’m not sure. I would have stuck with the Zalman but it only works on the shuttle xpc boards with the socket 478 retainer. It didn’t fit the SD32. :(

I also have to point out that getting it to fit in the regular shuttle g chassis was way harder because the regular g chassis positions the PSU much closer to the CPU.

Sweet n’ Sexy!

Very nice mod, and nice work!!! 

nervouschimp - 14 November 2006 01:55 AM

And there we have the Zalman in all it’s glory. The front-top fins were easily trimmed with a pair of scissors to fit the DVDRW.

hmm.  how much of a clearance is there between the copper fins and the fan?

is there a way that one could fit the hard drives in there if they trimmed that copper as well?  I have two so sitting one on top would just mean I’d have to fit the second one somehow.  There would need to be just enough space to ensure that the fan could run.  the hard drives could be flipped around and the cables ran through the front.

I didn’t take my Shuttle home with me so I can’t measure anything out.  silly of me.  but it’ll be two weeks before I can do that kind of measuring, lol.

btw, since you took out the Zalman, are you using it elsewhere or might you be willing to part with it? 

Now with an 8800GTX! Major mods underway. Working on a new lid, and new front and back plates. Dropped the optical drive for a fortron booster X3 to run the 8800gtx, but i will be incorporating a notebook optical in the new design. More pics coming soon.

Fkn sweet dude! thats some serious lanbox right there!
-Ash

nervouschimp - 08 January 2007 05:55 AM

Now with an 8800GTX! Major mods underway. Working on a new lid, and new front and back plates. Dropped the optical drive for a fortron booster X3 to run the 8800gtx, but i will be incorporating a notebook optical in the new design. More pics coming soon.

Jesus!!! What kind of PSU you have there???

Well, the power is being supplied by the 250w silenx standard, and the fortron booster X3 dedicated 300w gpu powersupply which occupies a 5.25 drive bay. In the photo, you will see that i have 2 power mains running into the back of my box. 1 runs to the 250w, and the other runs to the 300w. The 8800gtx is running now without hiccups under this configuration. The fortron booster X3 is not even warm to the touch, and the e6600 core2 duo idles in the mid 30s, but the 8800 generates a TON of heat. Even in 2D it is blowing of a bunch of hot air. Tonight I will run 3Dmark 06 on the current setup, and the connect the power leads on the 8800 to the PSU from my full-size tower and compare the scores to make sure the card is getting enough power and running to spec....

review of the fortron booster x3

ok. the 3dmark06 testing did not go well. with the booster x3, I am only getting a score of 3600.... not good. with the psu from my tower connected to the sd32, I am getting 10,500. on paper, the booster x3 technically should work, with it’s 25 amps (my atx psu only has 22 amps), but it appears the 8800gtx is throttled-down when connected to it. damn. back to the drawing board.