Designing a small MDF case - good move?

[greeef]

My mum recently pointed out an old machine that was cloggin up her office. I pulled it open to see a reasonably small motherboard, doggged with a tiny loud cpu fan and a bloody loud psu. I had already fitted a cheap seagate 5400rpm hard drive.

It's a celeron 633, luckily with the same heatsink mounting as my socket A system! i pulled out a big ol coolermaster heatsink that i'd already raided the fan from - it seems to dissipate the 20 or so watts passively quite effectively. My friend also recently gave me a relatively quiet mini-atx psu.

Anyway, this is the system as it stands, i've circled the peripherals i want to put into the new box. This will be a system we remote desktop into, so all it needs is a netwrok card (fitted) a psu and a hard drive.



The only problem is that i cant monitor temperatures - i dont even know if the mobo has temperature sensors on board. Is there an online calculator for working out what kind of thermal efficiency heatsinks of certain sizes have? I've seen an excel spreadsheet but i dont wish to install excel just for that.


Anyway, onto the task at hand. This case is clearly rubbish. My dad has offered to build an MDF case at his workshop, but i've never designed a case like this before. I was just going to squeeze everything down as much as i could and try to have the psu fan near the cpu sink to extract heat. I wanted to suspend the hard drive as well.

I apologise for my ramblings, but are there any pitfalls in mdf case design i should look out for? any tips? have other people designed small form wooden cases?

griff

[BigDonut]

if you point me to the excel spreadsheet i'll open it and ahve a look for you.

I guess as long as its well ventialted there wouldn't be a problem.
Funnily enough I was thinking about this very problem today. I have a bookcase sitting in the hall with a small cupboard at the end and was considering mounting a pc in there to act as a small file server but wasn't sure about the heat and stuff.

[ddrueding1]

I'd make sure that all the pieces that are usually attached to the chassis have grounding straps linking them to the power supply.