In the quest to cut down on shipping waste Taiwan's Asus has a novel idea: What if the shipping container became the PC case?
That's the idea behind a box the company will begin using from June to ship one of its Mini ATX motherboards. It holds the motherboard snug for shipping and is constructed so additional components required to make a PC can be added, said Debby Lee, a spokeswoman for the Taipei-based company.
An example of the box is on show at this week's Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany.
There are punch-out holes for ventilation and a real panel that houses the PC's connectors and interfaces.
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Cheers Don...
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Don McKenzie
Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
Henry Ford required that some component that he bought in for the model T be packed in a wooden box made of suitable quality timber with suitable holes drilled in its planks so that it became the car's floorboards. Or so folklore has it.
As a teenager, I owned a T model I was going to rebuild but never finished it, and a friend of mine just sold one he had, only a couple of years back. He had it for maybe 40+ years.
I always recall that floor board story even way back then, and also the one about "You can have any colour as long as it is black", which I believe was true.
So I did a quick google, and came up with this interesting page with some photos:
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and plenty of mentions of the floor boards.
Cheers Don...
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Don McKenzie
Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
**What the f*ck is wrong with these people? Reminds me of that Japanese restaurant (in Tokyo) that promoted itself as environmentally sensitive. They served meals on disposable paper plates. Fuck me. Same deal with this stupidity. My PC is a 3 year old Dore 2 Duo. A cardboard case would not have lasted the distance, so I would have had to replace the damned thing anyway. When I do replace it, I'll probably install a new M/B into the case, since it's steel and will last quite a long time. Sheesh!
Henry's T Model floor boards have lasted 100+ years. I agree, this case wouldn't last 100+ days I wouldn't think, and that's if you were very careful with it. Can you imagine kids around it?
Perhaps it is just to get some cheap ASUS press coverage, which it is probably doing.
Cheers Don...
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Don McKenzie
Site Map: http://www.dontronics.com/sitemap
Just had a look at that second video, this is a Mini ITX board, they don't give off as much heat, but I would still take care to have good ventilation.
I have a AT5nm10-I which is similar to the one shown, and am looking at using it in the office, to cut down on power and heat. Not a bad price either at about $120 including a factory installed processor and heatsink.
While OT, A couple of observations on this board (XP Pro SP3)
-Even with 2 case fans in a midi desktop case, the CPU temperature seems to always sit around 45-50c
-If you disconnect the VGA cable by accident while the PC is running, you will only get a blank screen when you reconnect it. Only a reboot brings back the pic.
-There is no IDE header or floppy header.
-only 2 SATA headers, so forget about dual HDD if you are going to use a DVD rom. You will need USB drives, which work fine under Win XP, but these are not recognized by the BART PE program in this MB.
-Has one PCI slot.
-This board does NOT like having the power turned off at the wall without being shut down in windows first. This will result in you having to boot in safe mode and do a system restore to before you did this ;). There might be ways to prevent this happening, but haven't looked hard yet.
-Other interesting features is a video option that allows you to rotate/invert the picture to a vertical (portrait) position rather than the usual landscape position. Windows looks very unusual like this, but this feature is probably used for applications like those advertising screens in some shopping centres that comprise of a Plasma screen positioned in a portrait aspect.
**Semiconductors are not a fire risk, unless they fail. Silicon stops working at 200oC. Well below ignition temperature of cardboard. By more concerned with resistor failures. They can easily exceed ignition temps of cardboard.
**Indeed. I should have included them. I repaired a device just last week, where the solid tantalum cap smoked itself and the surrounding PCB. Big mess for such a tiny (surface mount) component.
And one other thing I forgot. It's fairly rare, but ceramic caps can also short and set fire to the PCB. This weekend I just repaired an Agilent E3632A power supply where this happened to a .33uF ceramic at the input to an LM337T voltage regulator. Luckily the damage wasn't too bad, but I've seen them burn holes clean through a board.
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