Mark III

It's Built!

I finalized the Mark III in January - what remains on this page is out of date. I will try to update it in the near future.

Status

In November 2007 I acquired all parts for the Mark III and began to assemble them in early December. Unfortunately I had persistent crashes relating to the hard disk controller and I spent several days swapping out parts. I changed out cables, motherboards, power supplies, etc. I simply could not believe the odds that both hard drives were faulty. I finally was able to test the hard drives in the Mark II, and one failed a self test, while the other had read/write failures under light load. I have sent both hard drives back to the supplier for testing and replacement.

Building the Mark III

I set out with some initial goals of an improved Mark II, and ended up with these actual Mark III specifications. Currently it weighs in at around 5 kg, quite a bit less than the Mark II at 8 kilograms. And a lot lighter than the latest Dell XPS "laptop", whose power supply alone is 3 kg.

Photos

There is not much to see yet. I will post pictures of the case as well, but someone has borrowed my camera for the day!

First test build without case

In a test case - For testing only, not final!

The Mark II versus Mark III
Significantly smaller, and lighter.

Mark III case from side