On Sunday 24 April 2005 5:24 pm, you wrote:
My plan is to scratch-build a case and fix its various issues, but that's a project that hasn't started yet. I'll let you know if that ever becomes a reality.
It's crossed my mind a few times too, I have scratch built cases for MiniITX and Flex-ITX systems, but they tend to be a lot easier because the sizes of the boards give you a lot of flexability and the DC-DC PSU's tend to be very small.
If I was going to build an ATX (or BTX if it ever takes off) system then I would probably end up doing something similar to the Hush systems but in a tower format (I need more space for drives and cards than the Hush boxes allow) The only problem with Heat Pipe technology is that you would have to construct new pipes everytime you changed the position of the CPU (say by upgrading the Mainboard).
If I was going to build a more conventional forced airflow case then I would look pretty closely at what the big names are doing (Large heatsink with ducted air from a large but slow case fan) as that in my mind is a far more elegant solution than the little screamer stuck on top of the heatsink that we are usually stuck with. The reason you don't see ducting on OEM systems is again because the position of the CPU varies between Mainboards and architectures.
I was looking in the back of a iMac G5 yesterday and they use a sort of fan assisted convection system which seems to provide some sort of balance between a fairly power hungry CPU and what is actually a pretty quiet system.