Had a neat find at TJMaxx this week. They have Halloween decorations out and they had two sets of shadow box coasters, which I thought was an interesting concept. They had what I’m calling a mariachi skull printed on fabric and outlined in beads in them. They were nice, but I got the idea to reuse them.

For a while I’ve wanted to make some displays that feature specific categories of CPUs. My plan was to start with first generation Intel Core i3’s.

• Core i3-530
• Core i3-540
• Core i3-550
• Core i3-560

These CPUs used the Westmere 32 nm micro-architecture. They had dual cores with a frequency ranging from 2.93Ghz to 3.33Ghz. Upon release they cost $110 and up, but today you can get them off eBay for less then $10 usually. I got a couple of each. Funny enough one of the 560’s ended up being a second generation CPU by mistake so I guess I have that set started if I decide to go that way.

Making the CPU shadow boxes Coasters was easy, most of the work was done. In the future I would like to be able to make my own from scratch. For now I just saw an opportunity in the store. The back of the shadow box is held in place with some light glue, but it is very easy to pry loose. The existing cloth is lightly glued in place and it too is easily remove. I now have four skulls on fabric to use for… Something. I searched for several images of Micro ITX motherboards and sized and arranged them for printing. I used these as backgrounds to place the CPU onto. The CPU is held in place with double sided mounting tape. The type that is like a foam about 2 or 3 mm thick. Then the box was glued back together and it’s done.