Chiaroscuro by Nick Falzone

Acrylic

The lighting on this case evolved from multiple LCD screens, to an extensive led array, to a very simple solution: UV Blue acrylic (again sponsored by AC Ryan) and 10 20cm UV CCFLs (also sponsored by AC Ryan).

To attach the acrylic to the frame I decided to use a series of magnets. You might be thinking this would be a bad idea, especially given how strong these magnets are, but I put a whole stack of them around my (already running) main rig (at this point I did not really care) and nothing happened.

To attach the acrylic and aluminium fan grille sandwich to the ebony cube, I decided to use threaded aluminium inserts and the same screws as used on the rest of the aluminium. To do this, I simply drilled a couple holes and glued them in with polyurethane glue.

Hardware

To make a computer this small, yet powerful enough to also be a fully fledged gaming rig, the hardware choices were very important. The biggest struggle of all was finding a mini-ITX motherboard powerful enough to do what I wanted, including the ability to handle a full size video card. For this, I chose the J&W Mini-ITX MINIX motherboard, graciously sponsored by J&W.


Also needed of course were a decent but low powered CPU and for this I received an AMD Phenom X4 9350e quad core. OCZ also graciously sponsored me with 4GB of its DDR2 SO-DIMM memory.


And last but not least, AMD sponsored a Radeon HD 4850 to help with the gaming aspect of the case.