First off, we had to take the thing apart and see how it's assembled internally and determine if it's got standard mounts for the motherboard or not. Jackpot. It's all standard internally, and the power supply even has a P4 (?!) plug on it. Looks like we're good to go on project "Make the IBM not suck" (tm) Step one, all over parts except the PSU into the garbage. Regrettably the way this computer is assembled it needs half height cards, so I won't likely have too much luck finding an AGP card to fit it, but we've selected an MSI K7N2GM-L motherboard for the job, so the onboard Geforce 4mx shouldn't be too, too bad.

After disassembling the system and screwing the new motherboard in, we found the first several annoying but easily overcome problems.

#1) The retail heatsink that AMD provides is huge. In fact, too big to fit into this case really well. Fortunately we had a supply of the Thermal Take Slim Volcano 10's at the store. With a solid copper heatsink, and at a little over half the height of the stock heatsink, this seemed like it was just made for this little project.

#2) This motherboard is much larger than the one that was in the system previously. The hard drive fits into a little tray that mounts underneath the CD-ROM tray near the front of the system. Solution? Well, since we're not using a floppy drive, we'll just drill holes into the floppy mounting tray and screw the shiny new Western Digital 120 gig hard drive in there. Hmmm... Power tools.

All mounting issues solved, the machine was powered up for an initial test. I was somewhat leery of the little power supply, there was some internal debate over whether it would even have the ability to power the CPU, much less everything else I planned on cramming into the case with it. Remarkably enough, initial tests went perfectly. Everything powered up and detected without any problems. Much smirking and feeling pleased with myself ensues, and the Windows 2000 CD is dropped into the drive for an easy installation. I remember thinking "Wow. That went really smoothly."

Perhaps a little too smoothly, as Murphy steps in and lets me have the ol' size 12 combat boots right in the bojangles. Ouchies. The Windows 2000 install went in fine, but then started crashing completely at random once the chipset drivers were installed. Odd. Ram? Nope. Tried 3 different sticks of DDR3200 from different manufacturers. Bad hard drive? It is making a ting and powering down.... Nope....

Ah hah. It's got to be that stupid little power supply. Sadness filled me as I realized that perhaps my doubts regarding IBM's engineering prowess had been realized. After hooking up a thermal take 420 watt PSU externally, and attempting another windows install... no go. Tried an XP home install just to see if maybe it wasn't liking 2k for some reason. Nope. I then threw my hands up and went home for the night to think about it a little more. Came back in the next morning after puzzling over this little boggler all night and thought..... surely it couldn't be that the motherboard doesn't support PC3200?

It was. Duh. Threw in a stick of PC2700 and... it's all good. Windows install, updates, everything was alll good. Ran 3Dmark 2000 and 2001 overnight, and everything seems stable and creamy. Once things were actually working, it was time to make it pretty... and cool. I was concerned about the total lack of air circulation in this tiny case, and so I grabbed yea old hole saw and cut a 3" hole in the side of the case and mounted a fan in it, along with a snazzy crossed M16's fan grille from Sunbeam. Naturally the saw slipped and scratched the crap out of the case's paint job, so it had to be (poorly) repainted flat black.

Also installed into the case was a Sunbeam 300mm green cold cathode tube. We pulled all the plates out of the back of the case so we'd get the nice light glaring out of the rear of the case when everything was running. I'm looking forward to blinding the people sitting behind me with it. I also installed a little Sunbeam tri laser LED in the little ventilation grille in the front of the machine, so you get a blue light on the floor in front of it. Actually looks pretty neat, and it runs nice and cool. A full night of running the 3Dmark 2001 demo got the CPU up to 46 degrees. Excellent.

Result: The IBM no longer sucks! Mission accomplished, and I now have a nice little server to take to LAN parties with me that looks cool, and doesn't take up much space. And you could even play a few games on it. It'll certainly run Quake 1/2/3 and CS without any problems.

Total cost for the remake: (retail pricing, Canadian dollars)

IBM Chasis: FREE!
IBM 180 watt power supply: $150
Sunbeam Cold cathode light (green): $18
Sunbeam Laser led (blue): $12
MSI K7N2GM-L Motherboard: $140
AMD Athlon 2800+ CPU: $220
Sunbeam M16 fan grille: $7
XP home OEM: $160
MSI 52x CD-RW: $70
western digital 120 GIG hard drive: $170
Startech Case fan (generic): $15
Norton AV 2003: $35
AZen 512 PC2700 DDR RAM: $140
Thermal take slim volcano 10 fan: $30

Total cost: $1167.00+taxes. Ouch. That's way more than this thing is worth.. But.. It is cute I guess. Stupid expensive power supply.

Thanks to IBM for making crappy power supplies and motherboards. Thanks to Protocal for laughing when I showed him the converted system. Thanks to Sunbeam for shiny things, to Skeezix for commenting that it's a shame we're stuck with this IBM power supply and prompting this whole fiasco, and thanks as well to Dustbunny for providing us with scissors at work. Without her contribution, no templates could be created for the drilling of holes in metal thingies. And no, we never, ever run with them.