Ok, bear with me on this one, but I have a plan....
I'm thinking of buying 2 cheap motherboards with as many integrated components as possible + a couple of cheap processors (Either 2nd hand Athlon XP or maybe Sempron 64). Get either 512Mb or 1Gb Ram for each and then...
- Buy some plastic ~10mm thick
- Drill holes at the standard ATX locations
- Attach threaded rods (same diameter as the holes on the motherboard) into the holes, held in with either glue or nuts.
- Slide the 1st motherboard onto the rods, raised slightly from the plastic base using nuts/plastic washers
- Use more nuts and plastic washers to support the 2nd motherboard at about 6inches above the 1st.
- Then add a couple of cheap PSUs, HDDs to make a cheap server network/maybe experiment with Grid/Clustering
Am I being a bit crazy? It will work of course but is it worth it? I would eventually get round to putting the whole contraption in a cabinet of some sort with additional cooling.
Any comments?