stoolpigeon's Journal: Case Cutting

Well - I do dumb things a lot. I hope a byproduct is your entertainment.

So I have an Acer Aspire X3810 on my desk. I'm typing this post with it. It's my primary work machine and I like that little guy. Next to it (I just described this the other day - sorry) is a docked Latitude that's pretty old. It still works good though. BUT I started thinking that I'd like to free up some desk space and it really isn't necessary to have the laptop. I just need to put a video card in the desktop and then I can drive both my big monitors off that. I'm not losing much really - the laptop screen is not that bright and I never use it. Whatever I'm actually looking at gets shoved over to the big lcd.

The Acer case is small so I went on-line and looked at low profile cards. I ended up buying an ASUS GeForce 210 1GB 64-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Low Profile Ready Video Card, EN210 SILENT/DI/1GD3/V2(LP) from Amazon. That was the dumb part. I didn't even think to crack open my case and take a moment to look at the setup. I just read "Low Profile" clicked add to cart. I had it shipped to a buddy who went back to the states for Christmas and he brought it back to Hungary with him.

SO - I get it and I'm like a little kid on Christmas. I unplug everything from the back of the case, slide it open and realize immediately there is no way the card will fit. It's got this honking big heat sink on it. The slot it has to go in is millimeters from the top of the case. If the heat sink were on the downward side of the card, it might work, but it's on top. Well - I thought about it and I've decided I'm just going to cut a hole in the top of the case. It can't be removed. The case is one wrap around piece that provides top, bottom and one side - then the other side slides off. Tomorrow I'll bring my Dremel (and the big fat transformer I need to run it) and I'm gonna cut a big hole right in the top. I'll take pictures of course. I think it's actually gonna look cool in the end.

A guy I work with in the office said, "You'll have dust problems." I reject this view. The whole side of the case is pretty much full of all these round holes for air flow. If I keep things tight I don't think this will be that much worse.

Of course the kicker will be if I do all that and it doesn't work well. It's been a while since last time I tried running multi monitor with linux using a second video card so I'm hoping it will all be better than it was then.