Ok so here goes with the final (ish) part of my Temporary build.
I say ish because I have to do a couple of bits with some lighting and HDD's plus take some final pics if I can in this room.
I'm definitely going to prattle on a bit over this post, and I expect it will probably be quite long, and possible boring, but I hope you read it and give me your thoughts.
Oh yeah, I really really am sorry for the quality of some of these pictures. This is only about 1/4 of the ones I took, but the rest were either copies or extremely poor. It's due to the horrible light there in is my kitchen. Yellow, warm, dull evilness.
Moving on, first up I wanted to get the DVD drives in there. Obviously just having the normal Black fascia on there would look a bit out of place so they needed stealthing.
Only thing I could think of was to take the original bezels off their mounts and stick them on to the tray of the DVD drive with some sticky foam to allow them to press the button in the corner. The foam was an absolute nightmare as it got everywhere and was no use at all. I ended up using this really good double sided sticky gel strip stuff. It took quite a long time to get them spot on so they hardly moved but clicked perfectly in the corner which they do now. It was also an effort to get it so they didn't rub against each other.
For the buttons, I just chopped up a thick plastic washer and stuck it where they would push against. I filed them down until I got the thickness I wanted.
Next up was the front / top I/O panel leads.. While the USB and FireWire leads were coated in black plastic, the power, reset and led wires weren't so these needed braiding.
I hate braiding!!! Was a bit of a pain removing the top console too. (last pic exceptionally bad....)
With the console back in the top of the case and the wires routed, I needed something to plug them in to. My Friday was running out of time before I had to go out so I wanted to get some of the actual hardware in place.
Hit a bit of a problem though when I tried to put the motherboard on it's tray (which is removable in the ATCS 840 thank god). As per previous pages when I'd fitted the Thermalright MOSFET heatsinks, well, they didn't fit as there is a brace stopping it.
The first two pictures next show how it would have been obstructed if it was still attached to the motherboard. Also I've already bent it upwards in those pictures. It was seriously in the way before that.
Aaaaanyway, after a little head scratching, I decided to swap them over. However the heatsink that goes off at an angle also went too far over for the rear motherboard I/O connections and if reversed, went over the CPU water block mounting holes. Only option was to lift and tilt the heatsink a touch as shown in the third and forth pictures below.
With that problem out of the way, the motherboard was mounted and it was time to crack out some of my new hardware. Meet my NB water block who will help me hit those high FSB's and also my new Corsair HX750. By the way, this PSU seriously rocks. (bye bye ToughPower 1500W).
Now with the motherboard, and both water blocks mounted I could move on. I had to do another little bit of braiding on the fan above the rear I/O panel to keep it nicely hidden.
Next up to go in were the 4870X2 and X-Fi Sound Blaster Fatal1ty (yes he's an idiot but it's a good card for very cheap when I got it).
Four hardware pr0n shots coming your way.
After that, I pulled out my two new spangly 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3's. These will be going in RAID 0 with my current 1TB Spinpoint F1 acting as a backup drive for my important crap.
It was then time to unpackage the PA120.3 with 15mm spacings. I bought this rad new for these spacings specifically as it would fit the mounts in the roof of the ATCS 840 without any modding. It's a shame really as I've got a perfectly good PA120.3 (old spacings) sitting here now doing sod all.
Attached to this beast of a radiator are even more beastly fans, High Speed Panaflo's brought back from The States as you can't buy them over here. I think I spoke about these in a previous post, but suffice to say, they kick out serious air. I stupidly caught my finger in one of them and just about drew blood. Luckly the fan controller had them on about 4 or 5 V's or it would have been ****ing blood.
To get this whole lump to fit in the top of the case, I had to remove a brace. I gave the case a good ol pushing and shaking to make sure it wasn't going to leave it a bit wobbly. Seems this brace isn't that important.
A couple of pictures of the motherboard tray now back in place and the radiator mounted in the top of the case.
Also the power, reset, usb and firewire cables fairly well concealed along with a snap of things looking quite tidy and coming along nicely.
That was pretty much it for Friday and I then couldn't do any work on it until the Monday when I was off work. This is when I had a little accident.
It came to the point where I had to come up with a way to mount my Zalman fan controller. As mentioned in a previous post, the fan controller that had a bezel purpose painted in the same colour as the case couldn't handle the Panaflo fans properly. It made them make a horrible buzzing noise when lowering the voltages and also made them hum a little. While the Zalman didn't seem to be able to get them quite as fast nor could it stop them completely, it was
soooo much smoother.
Anyway, as with the DVD drives, I didn't want a black bezel sticking out like a sore thumb, so I was left with the problem of trying to stealth it.
Tom had told me that getting the Zalman bezel painted is a no go as the cost isn't in the size of the part, but in getting everything set up to paint it. I'll get it painted in the proper paint should Tom have another order for a case in this particular colour. Until then though I needed to remove it from the controller and see what could be done.
The only way I was going to get one of the blakning bezels from the case on to the fan controller was to cut the edges off it and basically have it completely flat so I could drill the holes for the six channels to poke through.
This is when
disaster struck. I'd cut it perfectly and taken my time and it looked good, but like a bit of a bell end, put my Dremel wannabe down without really looking. It fell down and scuffed the bezel in two places.
This ****ed me off a bit, but it wasn't the end of the world. I half expected me to bugger it up anyway while cutting it but didn't. Something had to go wrong somewhere.
Anyway only reason it's not the end of the world is that, as it's a dark scuff, it's hardly noticeable in normal light from more than a few inches. Plus, like I said, I hope to get the original Zalman bezel painted at some point.
Moving on, the drilling when alright. Had to take it slowly and make sure the bezel wasn't bending too much. As it was already scratched, I thought I'd take the risk with drilling little holes for the LED's too which came out fine.
I then ran into yet another snag. After fitting it into the case, I found that due to it not being very deep, that it was leaning downward and stopping the top DVD drive from opening. Again, after a fair bit of pondering and tinkering, it was simplest of ideas that found the solution. I folded a bit of thick cardboard box and stuck it to the bottom of the heatsinks on the bottom of the controller. This pushed the unit up far enough for the DVD drives bezel to slide in without catching anything.
The last picture here I just took as I didn't have a front on view I thought was an acceptable quality to post. All the ones I had sucked arse.
With all of the front finished and the hardware mounted, it was time to tube and fill the loop up and get it leak testing.
I've gone with 3/8" over 1/2" barbs without any ties or clips this time around. Bought some small cable ties for this purpose, but it's such a tight fit, it doesn't really need them. I let my girlfriend choose the tubing for this one, and to be fair, it looked a lot less green in the pictures on the shop. It looked a bit Turquoise rather than Toxic Green but hey ho there ya go.
There is logic to the order of the loop and length of the tubing. It enables me to pull the Pump / Res out far enough to empty or top up. It would have been very easy for me to go straight out of the radiator and directly into the Pump / Res but would have been too short a hose for removal.
Another picture shows the cabling mess behind the scenes and also have one of the little LCD poster add on that someone managed to get a hold of for me directly from Asus. Machos gracias again for that one!
Oh yeah and I've stuffed the best picture of the watercooling at the very end.
Hope you've enjoyed reading this and hope it hasn't bored you quite to death.
Should have a few more pictures of the completely finished build in a week or so.
Cheers!!!!