RageX wrote: The Fuel has, supposedly, an ATX MOB (not quite?) ... but you'll need to get the hacksaw out to accommodate the graphics card? The Fuel puts the graphics at the bottom of the case, it's not part of the AGP/PCI/PCI-Express card cage area ...
I'm guessing your budget is small but have you considered a custom case? We built a custom rack mount case for a customer and the tooling and sheet metal charges were only a few thousand; the Engineering time was a lot more $$$. The injection molding is another story ... $$$
I've considered the graphics card, and I believe it might just work, some chassis work might be required but I'm confident this could be a "go". We'll know as soon as I receive the case. I've measured the mobo and this might just work.
I intend not to spend more than a few hundreds on this deal, simply because there's no need for it, it either works or it doesn't. If I was going to follow the custom case road (I thought about it) I'd rather go buy a Tezro or Origin 2k/Onyx^2. And quite honestly, a 600Mhz Octane2 is roughly $600, therefore, therefore why would I spend more than a few hundred bucks on a Fuel mod?
This is entirely an "amateur" case mod, don't expect anything shiny, but I intend to try, and I believe this is the most important thing. Also, and that's an important thing (at least for me) I bought a large case to reduce the overall noise, I intend to chose the fans carefully in that regard. I've also considered server cases, but I've decided not to go this way either as most of them are usually very noisy.
I've always considered that the original Fuel case was of mediocre quality, especially compared to the Octane 2. In that regard I do like the Octane 2 better than the fuel, unfortunately, the Octane 2 has limited number of drives and/or no possibility to handle a SATA drive and a CD/DVD reader, which is a showstopper to my project. The number of Octane 2 pci slots is also limited to 3 (4 for the Fuel), while this is not a major concern, this is a little plus.
I certainly hope that the case I've just bought will do the job, I would imagine I will receive it in about a week from today, which gives me enough time to think about the cooling part and other things.
Mia
) But you already know all that. In any case, glad you joined, just put this excellent hardware to good use.
