Originally posted by valenki
What I am really dissapointed about is that there is no space whatsoever behind the glove compartment. My CPU will have to be almost vertical or at 70 deg. angle.

Should I just forget about it and put the cpu under the seat? But then most of my wiring will be too short and cd's will be difficult to get out.
I'll describe to you my solution. Part of which I implemented, and the other part which I have yet still.

The case I'm using was a generic electronic enclosure I ordered from the UK (was too lazy to get it custom fabricated). I had to chop it down several inches to get it under the seat. This included having to remove the block of foam underneath the carpet directly behind the seat.

Now, because i'm running my pc's desktop at the lcd modules native resolution (840x480), I have the additional space in the enclosure taken up by a radeon using the only PCI slot on the board, and laid out flat alongside the motherboard with a PCI angled riser. A 2.5" HD is mounted directly underneath the radeon card.

After this, no space for the powersupply in the case. The powersupply sits secured underneath the passenger seat, and I made custom ATX extenders for all the cables. They run under the carpet and under the console to the enclosure.

I thought originally there would be enough space to mount a slimline cd drive at the top of the case and clear between just underneath the seat and the hump. But I had to tuck the case so far under the hump, and make it so thin height-wise to clear the brackets that control the seat sliding it quickly eliminated that idea.

So now currently the system has no cd drive. My plan is to upgrade the board to a Epia M1000 with USB 2.0, so I can use an external slotload slimline cd/dvd player and flush mount it into the side of the console using the space thats there now from where the cd changer once was. (currently I just use a 1gig microdrive to transfer data in and out of the car)

So if you mount it under the seat, and you're concerned about cd drive access, you can just go mounting the drive somewhere else in the car.

You can get away with about 5 meters on usb cable with full speed devices. 3 meters with low speed. Anything past this you risk interference, and in a car it's very likely.

For doing an external drive it's that or use Firewire. On Firewire, the distance between each node or hop should not exceed 4.5m and the maximum number of hops in a chain is 16, for a total maximumend-to-end distance of 72m. Cable distance between each node is limited primarily by signal attenuation.

As for the wiring being too short in general, they can all be extended... ATX power cables, keyboard/mouse (go wireless), VGA can do 15 ft and be ok, an NTSC signal won't be a problem either.

hopes this helps dude, good luck!