It was a VIA EPIA 800MHz board+processor with a 80GB IDE drive, I later added a 120GB drive. I also integrated a Belkin wifi router, making it the center of my home network. The system was a fileserver for torrented episodes of StarTrek TNG that I would stream to a pocket pc over wifi 802.11b, haha.
The VFD display was a Noritake one from a group buy over at [H] and PhaetonForums, I connected it to the parallel port by soldering directly to the motherboard and physically removing the connector. It was cool back then to insert 3mm led’s into molex connectors, so that’s how they’re lit up. Power supply was a FSP unit, one of the earliest with Active PFC. It’s installed in the base, with a 10mm green led serving as the power button and light. The hole underneath it was for the reset switch. Construction was with tinted acrylic from a sign making shop. All of the panels except the front one were sanded for a frosted effect. All holes were hand drilled and it was held together with angled strips of aluminum. The top cube was about 8 inches square, so it was very compact.
Mini-ITX remained a premium underpowered form factor for over a decade so my other systems were either Shuttle XPC’s or Flex-ATX. I loved IBM’s Netvista S40 so much that I purchased the case twice over the years and paid an unreasonable amount to have it shipped to India only to have it arrive damaged. Some day I hope to recreate the front fascia with resin based 3d printing for a custom enclosure.
About five years later after that build above, I built a 5TB fileserver in my first Lian Li case, the PC-Q07. A drive cage was riveted inside, forcing the Seasonic power supply to the rear.
I haven’t been very attracted to USFF builds because I like the expandability that comes with PCIe slots and multiple drives. I do have a few branded USFF’s, they’re quiet machines used by family where a full a desktop would be an eyesore, so they happily live behind the monitor mounted on a vesa plate.
I have a long and maybe unhealthy history of single-purpose sff x86 machines (fileserver, firewall, seedbox, owncloud, htpc) that I’ve moved to VM’s in the last couple of years. I dream of having a hedt mini-itx system as a VM host someday, hopefully. I do have about a half dozen sff projects lined up for the later half of this year so this’ll be a fun thread to reference and revisit.
