AdmiralDonut
New member
Hi everyone,
First time posting in this section and my first time as a freshly minted modder as well so please, be gentle
I've been into building PC's since the early 90's and even made it a career for a while, but I have only just taken the plunge in to the world of modding.
I moved from the UK to Germany last year to be with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and came armed only with a £300 laptop. That obviously wasn't going to cut the mustard so I set about building as low a budget rig as I could. Some people may see the specs and raise their eyebrows, but it will all make sense in the end.
Some pieces, including the CPU, GPU and RAM were all sourced, second hand, from eBay. This allowed me to get a few astounding bargains, including the ram, which only set me back €109. So, on to the parts list:
i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz.
16GB Corsair Vengeance LP RAM 4x4GB.
MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming motherboard (Formerly ASRock Z77 Pro3 motherboard.)
Inno3D GTX 670 2GB.
OCZ Fatal1ty 550W Semi-modular PSU.
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD.
WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM Mechanical.
Samsung 500GB 7200RPM Mechanical.
Xigmatek Dark Knight Night Hawk Frostbourne Edition cooler.
Individually Sleeved white 24-pin cable from Akasa.
Flat Ribbon Motherboard 8-pin from Akasa.
2 X Akasa Apache Black 120mm fans.
2 X Arctic Cooling F12-pwm rev 2 120mm fans.
2 X LC-Power Red LED case fan (Came with case).
1 X Xigmatek 120mm fan originally from cooler.
1 X 1 Meter Sleeved, NZXT Red LED light strip.
LC-Power Air Wing 975W PC Case.
LG Flatron IPS224 21.5" LED monitor.
Packard Bell/Acer Viseo223DX 21.5" TN monitor.
Akasa FC.SIX 6 channel fan controller.
Steelseries APEX RAW Keyboard.
Perixx MX-1000 gaming mouse.
Speedlink Wireless PC Strike-FX Gamepad.
Perixx DX-2000 900mm Gaming Mat.
Sharkoon XTATIC Wireless Gaming Headset.
Crappy €8 Digitus 2.1 Speaker set.
Brateck 2 Arm Desk Mounted Monitor Arm. (Bloody awesome by the way).
Sorry for the terrible quality, it was taken with my wifes Nexus 7. This was my rig shortly before my journey began.
The replacement motherboard as part of a rebuild prior to my modding binge
Last shot of the rig as she was before I got busy with the Dremel.
Voila! No drive cage. Drilling out the rivets was actually a lot of fun, though rather messy. Props to the case makers because, even though this case was cheap, it was also very well put together.
The reference cooler on my Inno3d GTX 670 was a tad loud, and more than a little too hot for my liking, so I sourced a Palit GTX 760 Jetstream cooler on eBay, got a replacement VRM heatsink from Prolimatech and then carefully airbrushed the shroud to match what I am hoping will be an almost entirely white and black colour scheme for my rig.
The jig is up! Sorry, that was an awful joke. Almost as awful as my "Workstation" which was essentially the windowsill in the downstairs kitchen/building site (literally) with some bits of scrap timber screwed to it. I am now getting a proper little Black and Decker style workbench though, which is awesome.
This was the aluminium I picked up for about €8 undergoing its transformation into the mid plate for my super sexy PC case You can see from this shot, where I kinda might have missed while "Bending" the plate and caught it with the hammer, leaving a very shallow dent behind. Ah well.
After making a fair few cardboard "dry runs" I finally settled on the simplest method of mounting the drives and creating a nice partition. The original drive cage mounted to the base of the case went bye-bye
After 2 undercoats and 4 top coats (I hate spray cans) I finally have a finish that I am at least mostly happy with. I removed the case badge from the outside of the side panel and relocated it here.
An older shot of the case shortly after I got my monitor mount just to show how the old side panel looked with the internal lights on full.
And how she looks after I stripped out the old window and replaced it with a home made version. I picked up some really nice 3mm plexi, cut to shape with a Dremel tool and fitted back using the tabs that held the original in place. Not astounding by a long shot, but it's the first time I've ever done this sort of thing and I'm bloody proud.
This is what happens when I am allowed to run free with small power tools. I got an Akasa 6 channel fan controller as part of my wedding present but having decided to remove the 5.25" drive bay I wanted a better way to mount the fan controller. So, off came the bulk of it's mounting, off came the top part of the case front panel (designed so that you could have a "stealth" ODD) and out came some glue and the dremel.
This is the back of the aforementioned front panel section. The original stealth ODD cover has been flipped over to help attach the front of the fan controller. A little super glue and some swearing and bobs your uncle it was done. Now when looking from the front, the control knobs are flush with the rest of the cases front panel, sitting inside a little recess.
With the 5.25" bay gone, and the fan controller in place, things are starting to take shape nicely. The PCI cables were dismantled and sleeved by me (also a first) using my trusty Lamptron toolkit and a lighter left over from my days as a smoker (never thought it would come in handy again) and I would like to get my hands on some wider bore sleeving to do the SATA and USB 3 cables. I may also re-sleeve the NZXT lights and all the fan wires.
A nice little shot from inside the case with the lights on. I'm really happy with the way this mod has turned out so far, given my newness to these things and my unfamiliarity with the tools and the materials. I should say that the 4th ram stick has been "fixed" after I finally found somewhere that sold replacement thermal tape stuff to put the heat spreader back on.
A side-by-side shot of before and after the whole modding lunacy started. I'm not done yet either. The front mesh sections were removed yesterday, sanded, undercoated and finally sprayed white to match everything else and are now back in place. The front panel section depicting the case companies logo has also been treated to remove said logo. If I can ever get a response from MSI I hope to obtain at least one more case badge to mount on the front of the case.
One last major change is due as soon as the new Dremel arrives (the last one decided to throw a short somewhere in the stator and I don't have the tools to do a rewind sadly) and then I will be finishing the work on crafting a vertical panel that will sit inline with the motherboard tray and provide a vertical support for the SSD which is currently hiding under the midplate.
Well, that is a lot of talking and probably not a lot of sense. I hope you enjoy looking this over, and if you have any suggestions (particularly on the issue of the damn case badges) I will be more than happy to listen and answer. Thanks also goes out to all the other contributors whose own efforts helped encourage me to try this out for myself, and thanks to TTL for helping create this awesome place.
Peace out
Donut.
Here is a link to the imgur album I made during my adventure, I hope that doesn't break any forum rules. http://imgur.com/a/loTYS#0
EDIT TIME!!!!!
Edit posted at 18:18 (ish) September 12th.
A little edit showing my first attempt at an all acrylic side panel that I decided to have a try at after numerous people insisted I try. It sucks to be honest. The acrylic has cracked in two places, one isn't a full depth crack, the other...well, you'll see. The funny white marks all over the piece are just bits of masking tape that are proving stubborn, not scratches or anything like that.
This one shows the panel in its current, rough state. It is being held on with small circular velcro pads for the time being, just so that I can see how it looks without needing to hold it in place myself. I will still need to remove a good 6-8mm of material from the back edge and 3-6mm from the bottom edge for it to be considered mostly finished. That and drill the four small holes that will allow me to use modified thumbscrews to screw the panel to the case.
This picture shows the friggen mess I made of cutting the acrylic
I have decided that the broken section can be trimmed, glued back in to place, sanded smooth (very bloody carefully) and then masked by painting a thin border of white paint all around the border of the side panel. This should also help to mask the smaller partial depth crack you can see up and to the left of the major breakage.
People will probably tell me to ditch this piece and try again, but sadly my budget has been completely exhausted with the rather more needed purchase of the jigsaw (our home is a work in progress itself, most of which is being done by me to save money) so I will have to make do with what I have.
So, there we have it. Not a great start I'll admit, but hopefully it is salvageable or I've just wasted the last bit of "spare" cash I had :'(
First time posting in this section and my first time as a freshly minted modder as well so please, be gentle
I've been into building PC's since the early 90's and even made it a career for a while, but I have only just taken the plunge in to the world of modding.I moved from the UK to Germany last year to be with my girlfriend, who is now my wife, and came armed only with a £300 laptop. That obviously wasn't going to cut the mustard so I set about building as low a budget rig as I could. Some people may see the specs and raise their eyebrows, but it will all make sense in the end.
Some pieces, including the CPU, GPU and RAM were all sourced, second hand, from eBay. This allowed me to get a few astounding bargains, including the ram, which only set me back €109. So, on to the parts list:
i5 3570K @ 4.4GHz.
16GB Corsair Vengeance LP RAM 4x4GB.
MSI Z77A-G45 Gaming motherboard (Formerly ASRock Z77 Pro3 motherboard.)
Inno3D GTX 670 2GB.
OCZ Fatal1ty 550W Semi-modular PSU.
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB SSD.
WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM Mechanical.
Samsung 500GB 7200RPM Mechanical.
Xigmatek Dark Knight Night Hawk Frostbourne Edition cooler.
Individually Sleeved white 24-pin cable from Akasa.
Flat Ribbon Motherboard 8-pin from Akasa.
2 X Akasa Apache Black 120mm fans.
2 X Arctic Cooling F12-pwm rev 2 120mm fans.
2 X LC-Power Red LED case fan (Came with case).
1 X Xigmatek 120mm fan originally from cooler.
1 X 1 Meter Sleeved, NZXT Red LED light strip.
LC-Power Air Wing 975W PC Case.
LG Flatron IPS224 21.5" LED monitor.
Packard Bell/Acer Viseo223DX 21.5" TN monitor.
Akasa FC.SIX 6 channel fan controller.
Steelseries APEX RAW Keyboard.
Perixx MX-1000 gaming mouse.
Speedlink Wireless PC Strike-FX Gamepad.
Perixx DX-2000 900mm Gaming Mat.
Sharkoon XTATIC Wireless Gaming Headset.
Crappy €8 Digitus 2.1 Speaker set.
Brateck 2 Arm Desk Mounted Monitor Arm. (Bloody awesome by the way).
Sorry for the terrible quality, it was taken with my wifes Nexus 7. This was my rig shortly before my journey began.
The replacement motherboard as part of a rebuild prior to my modding binge
Last shot of the rig as she was before I got busy with the Dremel.
Voila! No drive cage. Drilling out the rivets was actually a lot of fun, though rather messy. Props to the case makers because, even though this case was cheap, it was also very well put together.
The reference cooler on my Inno3d GTX 670 was a tad loud, and more than a little too hot for my liking, so I sourced a Palit GTX 760 Jetstream cooler on eBay, got a replacement VRM heatsink from Prolimatech and then carefully airbrushed the shroud to match what I am hoping will be an almost entirely white and black colour scheme for my rig.
The jig is up! Sorry, that was an awful joke. Almost as awful as my "Workstation" which was essentially the windowsill in the downstairs kitchen/building site (literally) with some bits of scrap timber screwed to it. I am now getting a proper little Black and Decker style workbench though, which is awesome.
This was the aluminium I picked up for about €8 undergoing its transformation into the mid plate for my super sexy PC case
You can see from this shot, where I kinda might have missed while "Bending" the plate and caught it with the hammer, leaving a very shallow dent behind. Ah well.
After making a fair few cardboard "dry runs" I finally settled on the simplest method of mounting the drives and creating a nice partition. The original drive cage mounted to the base of the case went bye-bye
After 2 undercoats and 4 top coats (I hate spray cans) I finally have a finish that I am at least mostly happy with. I removed the case badge from the outside of the side panel and relocated it here.
An older shot of the case shortly after I got my monitor mount just to show how the old side panel looked with the internal lights on full.
And how she looks after I stripped out the old window and replaced it with a home made version. I picked up some really nice 3mm plexi, cut to shape with a Dremel tool and fitted back using the tabs that held the original in place. Not astounding by a long shot, but it's the first time I've ever done this sort of thing and I'm bloody proud.
This is what happens when I am allowed to run free with small power tools. I got an Akasa 6 channel fan controller as part of my wedding present but having decided to remove the 5.25" drive bay I wanted a better way to mount the fan controller. So, off came the bulk of it's mounting, off came the top part of the case front panel (designed so that you could have a "stealth" ODD) and out came some glue and the dremel.
This is the back of the aforementioned front panel section. The original stealth ODD cover has been flipped over to help attach the front of the fan controller. A little super glue and some swearing and bobs your uncle it was done. Now when looking from the front, the control knobs are flush with the rest of the cases front panel, sitting inside a little recess.
With the 5.25" bay gone, and the fan controller in place, things are starting to take shape nicely. The PCI cables were dismantled and sleeved by me (also a first) using my trusty Lamptron toolkit and a lighter left over from my days as a smoker (never thought it would come in handy again) and I would like to get my hands on some wider bore sleeving to do the SATA and USB 3 cables. I may also re-sleeve the NZXT lights and all the fan wires.
A nice little shot from inside the case with the lights on. I'm really happy with the way this mod has turned out so far, given my newness to these things and my unfamiliarity with the tools and the materials. I should say that the 4th ram stick has been "fixed" after I finally found somewhere that sold replacement thermal tape stuff to put the heat spreader back on.
A side-by-side shot of before and after the whole modding lunacy started. I'm not done yet either. The front mesh sections were removed yesterday, sanded, undercoated and finally sprayed white to match everything else and are now back in place. The front panel section depicting the case companies logo has also been treated to remove said logo. If I can ever get a response from MSI I hope to obtain at least one more case badge to mount on the front of the case.
One last major change is due as soon as the new Dremel arrives (the last one decided to throw a short somewhere in the stator and I don't have the tools to do a rewind sadly) and then I will be finishing the work on crafting a vertical panel that will sit inline with the motherboard tray and provide a vertical support for the SSD which is currently hiding under the midplate.
Well, that is a lot of talking and probably not a lot of sense. I hope you enjoy looking this over, and if you have any suggestions (particularly on the issue of the damn case badges) I will be more than happy to listen and answer. Thanks also goes out to all the other contributors whose own efforts helped encourage me to try this out for myself, and thanks to TTL for helping create this awesome place.
Peace out
Donut.
Here is a link to the imgur album I made during my adventure, I hope that doesn't break any forum rules. http://imgur.com/a/loTYS#0
EDIT TIME!!!!!
Edit posted at 18:18 (ish) September 12th.
A little edit showing my first attempt at an all acrylic side panel that I decided to have a try at after numerous people insisted I try. It sucks to be honest. The acrylic has cracked in two places, one isn't a full depth crack, the other...well, you'll see. The funny white marks all over the piece are just bits of masking tape that are proving stubborn, not scratches or anything like that.
This one shows the panel in its current, rough state. It is being held on with small circular velcro pads for the time being, just so that I can see how it looks without needing to hold it in place myself. I will still need to remove a good 6-8mm of material from the back edge and 3-6mm from the bottom edge for it to be considered mostly finished. That and drill the four small holes that will allow me to use modified thumbscrews to screw the panel to the case.
This picture shows the friggen mess I made of cutting the acrylic
I have decided that the broken section can be trimmed, glued back in to place, sanded smooth (very bloody carefully) and then masked by painting a thin border of white paint all around the border of the side panel. This should also help to mask the smaller partial depth crack you can see up and to the left of the major breakage.People will probably tell me to ditch this piece and try again, but sadly my budget has been completely exhausted with the rather more needed purchase of the jigsaw (our home is a work in progress itself, most of which is being done by me to save money) so I will have to make do with what I have.
So, there we have it. Not a great start I'll admit, but hopefully it is salvageable or I've just wasted the last bit of "spare" cash I had :'(
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