Hardware Hackers Packard Bell Sleeper PC V1.0

The concept was simple, Follow the term derived from the car scene where a "Sleeper" was a run of the mill, every day car running a large tuned engine with loads of power, that surprized people when it was unleashed at the Drag Strip.

VIDEO LINKS:
Part 1 - Tear down and clean

Part 2 - Paint and Rebuild

Part 3 - USB 3.0 Upgrade


We started with a Packard Bell iMedia from 2002


Rubbish factory cable management


so we stripped her down


At its heart we had the MIGHTY Intel Celeron 1GHz, 256mb of PC133 ram, a PCI network card and of course the good old 56k modem


The mighty Socket370 Celeron 1GHz - not so great in 2002... never mind 15 years later


a poorly fitted (with only 1 screw) Samsung IDE Hard Drive (we assumed the original had been replaced at some point)


The spec was rounded off with a 52x CD-Rom drive and of course a floppy drive


The case was stripped down


and top removed


Then interior was given a gloss white paint finish



Then reassembled - ensuring the rear of the case remained factory silver




Now the build could commence, We chose the following spec:
ASUS H81M-P Plus MATX motherboard
Intel 4th Gen i3-4130 @ 3.4GHz
CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 EVO CPU Cooler
8GB (2x4GB) of Crucial Ballistix SPORT DDR3 Ram
60GB Kingston SSDNow300 SSD
and am ACE 400Watt PSU








We wrapped the PSU in gloss black Vinyl to improve the way it looked








We then took the 52x CD-Rom and a modern DVD-RW Drive and done a face plate swap

The DVD-RW doesn't have a volume control so we had to make a small bracket to mount the dial so it looked legit!


The machine was then assembled



One of the best wire tucks we have done in our opinion!



Testing 3DMark2001se (the latest benchmark at the time the iMedia was released!) on the onboard Intel Graphics.



The factory Windows XP and Intel Celeron stickers were retained for LOLz


Who would suspect anything other than an old, slow, ancient machine


A cheap deal at a local Maplin store saw a little upgrade...




The next issue to overcome was no front panel USB as the Packard bell header was wired differently (black is Packard bell, blue is a normal USB


instead of re wiring this to get USB 2.0 working, we instead went straight for a custom USB 3.0 setup with a cable from ebay, from china


Cut a small mounting panel


fitted the ports to the middle


with the original


and finally fitted! (upside down, doh! a job for another day to rectify)



That is all for now, future plans include creating an adaptor that allows the floppy drive to work 100% as its currently only for show and the addition of a low power/heat GPU but enough for some 1080p gaming.