Obtained case for Nano-ITX review

I did a favour for a friend the other day and extracted data from a dying hard drive which wouldn't boot. You know, the usual 'death clicks'. Anyway, I managed to get the data off the drive and onto a DVD, and my friend donated her old PC to me (4 years old). There wasn't a great deal of any use in the machine, but a few bits will come in handy for my Epia-N review.

So, I've stripped the internals out of the DVD drive that was in it for use when testing the Epia-N when it arrives, and kept a few handy cables and switches, like the PCB with hard drive activity LED, power switch and reset switch, as well as a couple of front-mounted USB ports.

The DVD drive enclosure looks like it has enough space for the board plus about 7cm behind it, which could be used for a PSU board and perhaps an IDE to CF adapter. The lid also screws down onto the sides with quite long screws, so I should be able to screw the lid down to make contact with the heatsink and so accomodate an overall Epia-N unit height range of between about 35mm and 40mm. I'll post a pic later on, when I get round to charging the batteries in my digital camera:)

I'm still not clear at this stage exactly what the overall height of the Epia-N is, since nobody at VIA has yet come back to me with a definitive figure. The manual indicates 35mm, but I suspect that this is a measurement from the board surface to the top of the heatsink. If this is the case, then I'm not sure it'll fit. Also, since the board will be a loan from VIA for the purposes of review, I won't be spending any money on the project - it'll only be proof of concept.

If I ever do a build of this project to use myself, and I may do if the proof of concept works and the board isn't prohibitively expensive, then I'll most likely use the materials I mentioned in one of my earlier posts to make the lid, front fascia etc.