My Niece Alex's Revitalized Rig

I thought I would share my weekend adventure.

My sister asked me for my help a few weeks ago with breathing some life back into my Niece Alex's' computer. Being the loving brother and uncle, I decided I would put all my efforts into this.

The first goal was to bring her computer up to speed so she could play more modern games as her HD 4850 and one HD was starting to show its age. We had to do the project on a tight budget. fortunately most of the components were salvageable aka system memory, motherboard, processor and some cables.

The second goal was to make the computer unique, reliable and professionally built as possible with the supplies at hand. So I called in a few favors, rounded up a couple old hard drives, power supply, a new graphics card and grabbed my airbrushing kit. My sister purchased a budget case, made a few necessary trips to the store for odds and ends, gave ample support during the entire process and kept my belly full of beer and tasty food to keep my stamina up

I failed to take before shots but all I need to tell this amazing community is "birds nest" and "haunted house" for you to understand what I was working with. System specs are as follows.

Case: NZXT Source 210 Elite White (New)
Motherboard: Foxconn A79A-S AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition
Memory: Wintec AMPX 4GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066
Graphics Card: DIAMOND Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB 256-bit
Power Supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk III Series 500W
Hard Drives: 2x Hitachi desk star 160GB, Hitachi super slim 360GB

Whew.... that was a bit of a rant. Your patience is appreciated.

The Results.

lookls really nice mate for what you had, though personally i would of gone for a gpu with a better cooler

Thanks Tripp! The graphics card was one of the favors I called in so I didn't have a lot of choice there. Like I said we were doing this on a very tight budget. However when I removed the block I polished the copper plate to almost a mirror shine. I used Noctua Nt-H1 compound and ran MSI Kombustor GPU burn in test for 6 hours. The max GPU temp was 68C so I think the cooler works fine.

Awesome job Johnny, I'm sure your niece is over the moon

Holy crap that turned out awesome! Hope they enjoy it!

Thanks guys. She gets back from vacation at the end of the month. She doesn't know yet. I think she'll be thrilled.

Wow, that's awesome!

Looks great man! Nice paint job!

Looks nice, good job

Thanks again guys! Considering the limitations of the case, do you guys have any advice for me on what I could have done better with the cable management? I'm always looking for new tricks

JonnySuper said:

Thanks again guys! Considering the limitations of the case, do you guys have any advice for me on what I could have done better with the cable management? I'm always looking for new tricks

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With those style HDD cages you can poke zip ties through the holes and tie down cables to the cage. Gives you some more space to hide some extra cables near the front. You do have an SSD mounted there though.

Feronix said:

With those style HDD cages you can poke zip ties through the holes and tie down cables to the cage.

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That's a good idea. Ill try that next time. Do you have a pic as an example?

I don't really, sorry.

If I can find the time this weekend I'll try to find my Shinobi case, toss some cables in and snap some pictures for ya

Hey thanks Rick! That would be awesome.

Bit late, but as promised:

This is a Shinobi case. The best way to do this is when you have both side panels off. My HDD cages are completely toolless, which means that *every* bay has these plastic clips on them. These require removal in order to mount a drive, however, you can also just take them off, not mount a drive, and well... Just leave them off!

Doing that will give you (in my case (no pun intended)) 3 round holes and 2 more different ones:



You find the holes closest together, poke a zip-tie through one, reach from the other side and push it back through the other hole. You then push your cables to the HDD cage and pull the zip-tie to secure it all into place.

In this case I've done a quick mock-up build for you and I found that I only had 2 Sata cables and a fan cable that I needed to tie up there, so I grabbed a random Sata power cable bundle and threw it in there.



As you can see, the HDD cages are rather small and therefore offer a lot of space between the cage and the side panel:



If you find your zip ties are too short, you can easily tie their end to eachother and so creating a longer zip tie. You could also tie cables to other cables that are already tied into place

Rick. Thank you so much for taking the time to take these pics for me. I have said it before but there is no better pc community on the Internet. I will definitely try your advice next time I work with a case like this.

This absolutely made my day. Thanks again.

-Jon D.

JonnySuper said:

Rick. Thank you so much for taking the time to take these pics for me. I have said it before but there is no better pc community on the Internet. I will definitely try your advice next time I work with a case like this.

This absolutely made my day. Thanks again.

-Jon D.

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Not a problem at all, mate!

It'll look even better if you put some sort of metal/plastic sheet between the motherboard tray and the HDD cage (extending the mobo tray)