I found a nice, cheap, wooden box at Bombay Furniture Co. the other day. It was missing one of the photo albums and the hinges on the door were missing three screws, but it was marked down from $76 (USD) to $23 and it is (almost) the perfect size for a micro ATX motherboard.
Bombay has filed for bankruptcy and has been purchased by a liquidator so if you want to browse cheap furniture and trinkets, I highly recommend it.
The inside of the box measures 21.5 cm deep, 24.2 cm wide, and 18.7 cm high. Tight, but doable, but probably not with an optical drive.
As you can see there is a spot to insert a 4x6 inch picture on the top of the box, and I will probably leave it open and put a little cold cathode light inside the system.
I already have a set of hardware I want to put inside the box (same as my last project):
-PCChips A33G motherboard. Has a PCIe slot and up to 1000MHz front side bus.
-AMD Sempron 64 3000+ 1.6GHz with 256K L2 cache
CPU (SDA3000IAA3CN).
-Zogis Geforce 7300LE 256meg (512 TuboCache) low-profile vid card.
-One gig of A-Data DDR2 800 SDRAM.
-2.5inch 40-gig Fujitsu SATA drive.
-And possibly a Zyxel G-302 U3 54Mbps wifi adapter.
All this is already sitting in a mid-tower case I got free-after-rebate about a year ago.
Now here are the issues to overcome:
-Fixing the box.
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Will the magnets that keep the door closed interfere with the electronics?
-Air flow.
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Fitting a 24.4cm wide motherboard into a 24.2cm space.