Project and Write Up by John A.

I had been wondering what to do with the GTA4 safety deposit box that I had laying about gathering dust. Then I saw the GTA-PC built by Mark Harris and thought why the heck not have a go at building one?

The GTA-PC looked good but I decided I needed a bit more power and storage. I went for the mini-itx for-factor Gigabyte GA-GC230D motherboard with an Intel Atom 1.6GHz CPU that I knew could be overclocked to 1.8-2.0Ghz. Mated to that would be a 40GB 2.5” hard drive from a PS3 and 1GB of RAM. This would provide me with all the power and capacity I needed for a lounge PC.

I enlisted an electrician mate and his shed to help me with the project, and it took about 10hrs to get it up and running with XP installed. The most time consuming element of the project was customizing the case to fit all of the components; it wasn’t something we could be lax about, it had to be right first time. That’s where my electrician friend would come in!

The first step was to plan and measure the hole required for the rear motherboard panel. The GA-GC230D motherboard port positions were different than the mini-itx motherboard used in the original GTA-PC and were much closer to the left side of the board making the need for accurate cutting all the more important. The hole was cut using a fine metal saw blade to avoid a rough cut, then filed into shape to take the motherboard port plate. Following this, the hole for the power supply socket was also drilled, with plenty of space allowed for the raised motherboard components.

The next step was to drill the mounting holes for the motherboard. To do this, a paper template was made of the motherboard hole placements, and the holes drilled. The same was also done for the hard drive mounting holes.

Atom based motherboards run fairly cool, however the box had no  ventilati so I decided to copy Mark Harris and put in a 40mm fan with a protective grill, powered by the SYS FAN output on the motherboard. The hole for this was cut using a circular metal cutting tool.

It was at this point I had second thoughts about the only USB ports being on the back of the PC. I was able to cannibalize an old PC case for a pair of ports that I mounted on the side of the case opposite the fan. The final hole to cut was for the front mounted power button. I went for a simple blue LED button, although the bright light did need some toning down with a resistor (again sorted instantly by the electrician pal).

After filing all of the rough edges of the cut holes, along with a thorough cleaning, the case was now ready to accept all of the parts. First in went the hard drive and motherboard of course.

Following this the all of the cabling, power supply, 40mm fan, USB ports and power switch could all be fitted and connected up, just the same as building any PC from scratch. For the power I selected a space saving 90w Pico power supply.

To ensure good air flow and to keep everything tidy some small cable ties were used.

And that was it. My version of the GTA-PC ready to have Windows XP installed on it.

Here are a final couple of pictures showing the PC in action after it was turned on for the first time.

Update: After running the PC for a few days it’s performance was great, but I found the noise from the 40mm fan to be a real distraction. So I added a Zalman Fanmate 2 fan speed controller, bought for a few pounds, which now allows the PC to run almost silently. Once I’m sure that the PC still runs at a low enough temp I’ll be looking to overclock the Atom CPU to 1.8 or 2Ghz.