Print Page - Handmade nettop is just plain awesome

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The Level Eleven

The Thermaltake Level 10 PC chassis was designed by BMW, and is all kinds of awesome. Not only is it one of the coolest looking computer cases you’ll ever see, but it’s also designed to allow proper airflow between components, helping to keep your motherboard, Blu-Ray drives, hard drives, and graphics cards from overheating.

While you probably don’t need all of those features for a low power nettop, Jeffrey Stephenson decided to see if he could build his own case out of cherry wood and aluminum, while replicating the look and feel. His computer uses a 1.2GHz VIA Nano 64 processor, VIA VX855 chipset, and a VIA P820 Pico-ITX motherboard. It can handle 1080p HD video output through an HDMI port, which is excellent because this thing is begging to be shown off in your living room rather than hidden away in the office.

Stephenson’s system also has a 160GB SSD, 2GB of RAM, a slot-loading DVD burner and runs Windows 7 64-bit. It’s designed to pull air down through the case toward a vent near the bottom. And it’s not for sale.

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Inspired by the Thermaltake Level 10

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Hard Pennsylvania cherry with an aluminum inlay

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Powered by the VIA P820 Pico-ITX mainboard featuring a 1.2GHz
VIA Nano 64-bit CPU. The VIA VX855 integrated chipset offers
1080p video output via an onboard HDMI port.

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System memory is supplied by 2GB of Crucial DDR2-800 SODIMM
and the 3GB/s SATA storage is a 160GB Intel X25-M solid state drive.

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The optical drive is a Pioneer slimline, slot-load DVD burner and the
operating system is 64-bit Windows 7. The power supply is integrated
into the VIA Pico-ITX mainboard.

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Ventilation starts at the stainless steel screened inlet vents at the bottom of each enclosure box.
Air travels through the box and down into the support box through openings under the mainboard or SSD.

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A nine-bladed T&T 40mm case fan pulls air out of the support box interior and exhausts
out a vent located on the bottom of the auxiliary box.

Construction photos

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Additional views

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Quote

A comprehensive project worklog of Level Eleven with over 300 photographs can be accessed at

bit-tech.net, (http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=184073 (http://forums.bit-tech.net/showthread.php?t=184073))

HardOCP (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1499567 (http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1499567))

Overclockers Australia (http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=854002 (http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=854002))

I'm thinking this guy could be very busy in the near future, maybe even wealthy... ;)

I was thinking the same thing.

Windows News and info 15th Anniversary 2009-2024

Other Operating Systems => Fixes => Windows 7 All => Windows 7 | Windows 9 => Hardware => Topic started by: javajolt on May 06, 2010, 06:28:04 PM