HOWTO Make build a Home Theatre PC into an Ikea ILEN table

Here's a cute little Instructable for turning one of Ikea's ILEN side-tables into a home theatre PC:

My wife hated having the old ugly tower case in our living room, and I really wanted to do something special for my HTPC. So when my mother law was heading up to Chicago to stop by Ikea I saw my chance. This is a Pentium 4 HT 3.2ghz, 2gb ddr2, 500gb HD, ATI HD2600 w/DVI-HDMI adaptor, audio is DTS through digital coaxial. Right now I'm just running XP, while trying to pin down my favorite Media Center front end. I decided to go with no input devices. NO KEYBOARD, NO MOUSE. I use VNC via either my Nokia 770 tablet, or our laptop. The Nokia makes a great remote control using VNC. If anyone has any questions at all just let me know, this is my first instructable :). Oh! One thing that's not in the pictures is that I ended up having to add some 1/8 inch holes in the pattern of a fan intake above the processor so more air can be pulled in.

Link

[#1 posted by palindromic , February 19, 2008 12:00 AM]

Link contains extraneous slash. Also, how is this different from hiding a small shuttle case in the table? Saves you drilling all those holes..

[#2 posted by dculberson , February 19, 2008 6:56 AM]

Cooling gets to be a problem in an open-air system like that. I built a gamebooth system and it would overheat - until I put it all in a box inside the big box. It seems counterintuitive, but it works. The power supply fan provides a nice cooling current. If the motherboard's in a big box, and no fan is nearby, it can overheat.

Also, it's loud. Also, it's kind of ugly. Also, it's harder to work on.