Its been a very long time since I have had to do one of these so Ill try my bestestest to remeber whats what
Working on a PC all day long may sound amazing to many of you, but we all need a bit of seperation from 'work' at times. Its become obvious to me lately the reason I dont game is because I just dont want to sit at my main rig in the evenings as it felt too much lie work. I mean imagine finishing your working day and then thinking sod it Ill stay here till midnight just to play some games, youd either have to be very dedicated or slightly insane. Im pretty close to the last one but for different reasons!
Anyways on topic I personally love driving games and felt lost when my vision racer had to go back last year just before i40, so earlier this year I set it as my mission to try and replace the VR with another driving seat set up for the Logitech G27.
After a bit of sniffing around I came across a company called 'Play Seat' - they made a fairly wide range of products but the Evolution in white was the top of my hit list! After a few emails bouncing back and forth Play Seat agreed to send me the Evolution set up including the G27 - RESULT!
Now its all well and good having the seat set up but I really want to have it set up somewhere and not keep having to attach my bench rig ect, so I needed a small but powerful rig, and because its something I wanted to use alot it pretty much had to be customised aswell.
Right back to the original BitFenix Shinobi Modding guide this was when I was planning what I was going to be doing, seeing the potential of the Shinobi and the fact it pretty much fitted my needs exactly it was listed as being the case of choice. Luckily having a black and a white version I decided to do a 'test run' of some of the mods intended as a stand in main rig while my 600T project looms in the shadows. The video is below and it was all done in about 7 hours!
So the 6 hour build was just a tester for what I had planned for the main event. A white carbon fiber skin was planed, water cooled again, yet to be released Mayhem Pastel coolant and a custom GTX590 just to name a few highlights! So lets take a look at the parts before I start my work! Here we can just see the standard case, and a glimpse at the way the front looks before I hack it all apart!
Lets crack on with more parts, a big haul of BitFenix fans, lights and cable extensions were on the list of must haves
Watercooling wise I already knew that the RX240 kit from XSPC not only fit but performed very well and still allowed me to use the nigh on silent Spectre fans from BitFenix and still get great temps.
So the back bone of the system is a Gigabyte P67 UD4 Ive had kicking about since release, this normally gets used for emergency side by side case raping reviews but as this is pretty much EOL now I felt that it was time to try and put it to good use, teaming it up with the 2600K Ive also had here since launch is pretty OTT but meh. Memory and HDD wise I have 16GB of white low profile Corsair Vengeance, again massive overkill and I still may only use 8GB...... HDD wise a Sata3 Patriot WildFire was chosen which will be reviewed once the system is complete 120GB is big enough for the few games Ill be wanting to run and as its just for gaming a storage drive wont be needed.
With help from my buddy Bulmer on Friday night I decided to strip the GPU and also have a play with the carbon film........... For the eagle eyed amongst you thats a spare 590 cooler I had here I used in the end
I stripped the roof down, take note of the audio ports here though
Moving on I wont bore you any more Ill just spam photos and finish with a video!!!! ps: I did redo the front in the end and skin over the optical bay cover all in one aswell. None of them on the shinobi site perfectly flush but it looks good enough I think.....
Stealth logo anyone..............?
Plenty more to come yet
