Alot of folks are running cases like these:
http://amzn.to/mzWGQRThey can be picked up for about $35 and are perfect for open air mining. It will be hard to beat that price point.
That same company offers a stackable open air case that I absolutely love. It runs about $50 bucks and I can stack as many rigs as I need on top of each other. Check it out here:
http://amzn.to/jPdb7eYeah that looks really simplistic. I could take that design and cut it out on sheets of acrylic no problem. Heck, I could do that sell them for a similar price, but I don't think it'd be worth doing because the profit margins just wouldn't be there. I don' t want to start out with an open case design though, I'd rather do closed.
Look at Cablesaurus' mining rig for reference.
Yeah a friend had linked that to me. I had the plan for doing something like that for a couple months, but looks like he beat me to it. For such a basic stacking case design, he's really asking for a lot of money. $245? Are you kidding me? I'll be able to get the prototype of my case done really cheaply and when I'm ready to sell I can definitely beat that price.
A friend of a friend of mine can bend sheet metal so my mining friend and I came up with a design. The case would be a standard sized 19" 4U rackmount case. It could fit 4 high ends cards comfortably or 6 cheaper, lower powered ones. The cards would be situated above the motherboard at a height just above the stock sempron heatsink. For cooling, the back should be able to fit 3 120mm fans with the power supply oriented vertically or 6-7 80mm fans depending on the PSU. of course, this fan takes care of all your problems:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835706015We never ended up making it since the availability of good cheap cards ran out *cough5830cough*
Interesting you said that. I was actually planning on doing a 19" 5U rackcase. I was thinking about 4U, but I wanted to make sure it was tall enough to fit 2 PSU's and some of the taller cards. Do you have any design tips on doing a rack case?