andrevautour
New member
I though it would be a bit of fun to have a look back at some of my past builds and their evolution over the time I used them. Today I am having a look at my build for 2007, which was based on a Thermaltake Tsunami Dream.
The way I feel about the Tsunami Dream case is basically that it was average for it's time feature wise, fairly terrible by today's standards. Build quality was fairly poor, as is excepted. But, it was quite good looking in my opinion, at least the front aluminum bezel, and the design is way nicer than anything you see from Thermaltake these days.
I had this thing set up in so many different ways over the period of time that i had it, I can't even count how many different configurations I had in there.
Yesterday I uploaded tons of pictures of it, and I'm just going to go through them in order of oldest to newest and post the ones that I think will be most interesting.
So the case actually started off as this very very cheap entry level HP Pavilion a6228x.
The original specifications were:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
320GB SATA Hard Drive
16X DL DVD-RW Drive
Nvidia Geforce 6150SE
15-IN-1 Media card reader
Even though the HP cases are very plain and common obviously, I actually really like the look of them. I also enjoyed the card reader and some of the other things about the case like the stealthed optical drive at the time. I liked the look of the front I/O and on the higher end models they even had RCA jacks at the front for inputs.
it also had one of those slots of hp pocket media drives
before i made any changes at all, this is what it looked like inside right out of the box
even though there wasn't a massive amount of airflow or even any fans in the case in this configuration, they did include some ventilation holes in the front and in the sides of the hdd cage to keep the hard drives cooler. there is a 92mm fan grille that did not have a fan mounted in it in this particular configuration.
The other thing I liked about this case is that it had that sort of Silverstone style reverse layout on the inside, so when you put a graphics card in it, you can actually see the fan side of it instead of just the pcb side.
You can see here in this picture my old Sunbeam acrylic case with an athlon xp cpu in it that was being replaced by this.
there is a build log for that, you can see it here if you want. http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=47816
Now I know there hasn't been any actual building yet, but I am getting to that right now.
If you saw original specs for this you would have seen that it came with a 6150se, obviously this would not do, so immediately i ordered a 8800gts from evga
The PSU needed to be replaced to run the new card, so it was replaced by an Ultra Xconnect (if you've ever heard me talk about those you know how i feel about them)
You can see the card fan side is facing up
You can see the high end elastic bands used to keep the front panel IO cables out of the fan
Okay, so enough that that HP case, now only the actual build, or rebuild in the Thermaltake case.
I decided that I wanted a Tsunami Dream case simply because I thought it looked cool and it was popular at the time.
It had metallic blue chips in the pain on the side panels
The front panel was an actual solid chunk of aluminum, which is kind of impressive, but then it was attached to this horrible plastic panel behind that because the aluminum part opened to gain access the the optical drives etc and that made the whole thing feel like crap because the plastic was so flexible and cheap feeling and the aluminum door didn't swim very nicely as you might expect
The side panel had a fairly large window, which is a plus, although i think the Tsunami dream looked way better with the solid non window panel as seen on the box earlier
It had 120mm fans at the front, back and a single 92mm at the side. The side fan had that mesh which created loads of resistance noise and was annoying immediately.
The interior was aluminum which felt very cheap and light. It did have some nice features like rubber grommets on the HDD mounts, but the drives were all facing forwards instead of towards the back, so it has really crowded. It had horrible quick release clips on the PCI slots that were even cheaper and less effective than the ones found on the HAF 932. You may notice the USBs were located right in the middle on the top, so the cables hung down in the middle on the case and there was no motherboard panel to wide them behind. There was a little plastic door no the USBs that sat up vertically when anything was plugged in and of course that got broken right away.
it also included the totally useful purple quick release clips for fans that seemed to be so popular at the time for cases that wanted to list more features on the box. these were pretty much useless except for sparing the fan's screw holes from being mashed up with screws and obstructing airflow a bit.
i started taking hardware out of the hp case (which was actually a better case than the thermaltake now that i think of it)
i ended up going back to the hp case after a few months because the thermaltake case was so bad.
Hardware at the time as follows:
Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS
Corsair XMS2 4GB 800 MHz
Ultra XConnect 2 550W
320GB External Drive
Hitatchi Deskstar 320GB
Maxtor 500GB HDD
Asus M2N68-LA Motherboard
EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB SSC Edition
I still have the memory here actually. I just went downstairs and got a stick to take a picture of it.
I got this horrible blue LED fan to replace the side panel one.
I also had this dual fan pci slot graphics card cooler in there for a short time. This was also UV.
This is the stock ram that came in the hp machine
This was back in the windows vista days.
My Samsung SyncMaster 275T was pretty new back then.
We had a ton of these Vantec UV LED fans in all different color combinations.
I thought these were pretty nice looking
I started playing around with UV cathode rings and tubes
The etched thermaltake logo did glow a bit when it caught the light at certain angles. I will admit this is something that I have always been a fan of with acrylic side panels. You can see the graphics card cooler in there behind the text in the side panel.
I had my desks like this for a while
You can see the plastic panel behind the aluminum one on the case here. You can also see the metalic paint.
Some 120mm fans we had at the time
I still have the 120mm UV ones here now.
Here you can see the USB ports at the top of the case and the little flap that stuck up when it was open.
Some more fans. I liked these ones quite a bit.
Stock front fan
The plastic panel at the front also opened and then you got the the aluminium frame at the front.
These Vantec stealth fans were pretty good at the time.
You can see how tight it was fitting a graphics card in even with 3 hard drives installed
I still think it looked alright from the front. The only thing that ruined it a bit was that strip of chrome, which was the cheapest crappiest plastic and the rest was all solid aluminium
Since I couldn't fir any more than 3 hard drives in the actual HDD rack, I guess I had to resort to installing a 4th hard drive in the floppy bay
we still have this drive here actually. it is so slow by today's standards it's practically unusable.
Not sure what was going on here, some sort of changes i guess
Blue LED fan in the rear of the case.
Front of the case
I had another fan on the cpu cooler now. this time another one of those vantec UV ones but a solid one color version instead of the 2 color version from before.
This is also probably the neatest I ever had the case. I like these couple pictures a lot.
I like these red zip ties
There was a trick some people did back when hard drives used to face out into the case where route the sata cable in between the two drives and out the front to make it look neater.
I actually have a soft spot for these wire fan grilles. I kind of like the look of them to be honest.
This was definitely my favorite configuration i had in the case.
this is what the back panel looked like.
At one point I had some green and blue UV sleeving
I even reused this alien fan grille from the acrylic case on the cpu cooler at one point. obviously I was really bored.
You can also spot something else that was in the acrylic case which was that mutant mods bubble led tube thing up under the PSU and above the CPU
I'm going to have to stop here for now because I was way over the character limit and I had to break it up.
I have part 2 written up already and I will post it shortly
The way I feel about the Tsunami Dream case is basically that it was average for it's time feature wise, fairly terrible by today's standards. Build quality was fairly poor, as is excepted. But, it was quite good looking in my opinion, at least the front aluminum bezel, and the design is way nicer than anything you see from Thermaltake these days.
I had this thing set up in so many different ways over the period of time that i had it, I can't even count how many different configurations I had in there.
Yesterday I uploaded tons of pictures of it, and I'm just going to go through them in order of oldest to newest and post the ones that I think will be most interesting.
So the case actually started off as this very very cheap entry level HP Pavilion a6228x.
The original specifications were:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+
2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 Memory
320GB SATA Hard Drive
16X DL DVD-RW Drive
Nvidia Geforce 6150SE
15-IN-1 Media card reader
Even though the HP cases are very plain and common obviously, I actually really like the look of them. I also enjoyed the card reader and some of the other things about the case like the stealthed optical drive at the time. I liked the look of the front I/O and on the higher end models they even had RCA jacks at the front for inputs.
it also had one of those slots of hp pocket media drives
before i made any changes at all, this is what it looked like inside right out of the box
even though there wasn't a massive amount of airflow or even any fans in the case in this configuration, they did include some ventilation holes in the front and in the sides of the hdd cage to keep the hard drives cooler. there is a 92mm fan grille that did not have a fan mounted in it in this particular configuration.
The other thing I liked about this case is that it had that sort of Silverstone style reverse layout on the inside, so when you put a graphics card in it, you can actually see the fan side of it instead of just the pcb side.
You can see here in this picture my old Sunbeam acrylic case with an athlon xp cpu in it that was being replaced by this.
there is a build log for that, you can see it here if you want. http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?t=47816
Now I know there hasn't been any actual building yet, but I am getting to that right now.
If you saw original specs for this you would have seen that it came with a 6150se, obviously this would not do, so immediately i ordered a 8800gts from evga
The PSU needed to be replaced to run the new card, so it was replaced by an Ultra Xconnect (if you've ever heard me talk about those you know how i feel about them)
You can see the card fan side is facing up
You can see the high end elastic bands used to keep the front panel IO cables out of the fan
Okay, so enough that that HP case, now only the actual build, or rebuild in the Thermaltake case.
I decided that I wanted a Tsunami Dream case simply because I thought it looked cool and it was popular at the time.
It had metallic blue chips in the pain on the side panels
The front panel was an actual solid chunk of aluminum, which is kind of impressive, but then it was attached to this horrible plastic panel behind that because the aluminum part opened to gain access the the optical drives etc and that made the whole thing feel like crap because the plastic was so flexible and cheap feeling and the aluminum door didn't swim very nicely as you might expect
The side panel had a fairly large window, which is a plus, although i think the Tsunami dream looked way better with the solid non window panel as seen on the box earlier
It had 120mm fans at the front, back and a single 92mm at the side. The side fan had that mesh which created loads of resistance noise and was annoying immediately.
The interior was aluminum which felt very cheap and light. It did have some nice features like rubber grommets on the HDD mounts, but the drives were all facing forwards instead of towards the back, so it has really crowded. It had horrible quick release clips on the PCI slots that were even cheaper and less effective than the ones found on the HAF 932. You may notice the USBs were located right in the middle on the top, so the cables hung down in the middle on the case and there was no motherboard panel to wide them behind. There was a little plastic door no the USBs that sat up vertically when anything was plugged in and of course that got broken right away.
it also included the totally useful purple quick release clips for fans that seemed to be so popular at the time for cases that wanted to list more features on the box. these were pretty much useless except for sparing the fan's screw holes from being mashed up with screws and obstructing airflow a bit.
i started taking hardware out of the hp case (which was actually a better case than the thermaltake now that i think of it)
i ended up going back to the hp case after a few months because the thermaltake case was so bad.
Hardware at the time as follows:
Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS
Corsair XMS2 4GB 800 MHz
Ultra XConnect 2 550W
320GB External Drive
Hitatchi Deskstar 320GB
Maxtor 500GB HDD
Asus M2N68-LA Motherboard
EVGA 8800 GTS 640MB SSC Edition
I still have the memory here actually. I just went downstairs and got a stick to take a picture of it.
I got this horrible blue LED fan to replace the side panel one.
I also had this dual fan pci slot graphics card cooler in there for a short time. This was also UV.
This is the stock ram that came in the hp machine
This was back in the windows vista days.
My Samsung SyncMaster 275T was pretty new back then.
We had a ton of these Vantec UV LED fans in all different color combinations.
I thought these were pretty nice looking
I started playing around with UV cathode rings and tubes
The etched thermaltake logo did glow a bit when it caught the light at certain angles. I will admit this is something that I have always been a fan of with acrylic side panels. You can see the graphics card cooler in there behind the text in the side panel.
I had my desks like this for a while
You can see the plastic panel behind the aluminum one on the case here. You can also see the metalic paint.
Some 120mm fans we had at the time
I still have the 120mm UV ones here now.
Here you can see the USB ports at the top of the case and the little flap that stuck up when it was open.
Some more fans. I liked these ones quite a bit.
Stock front fan
The plastic panel at the front also opened and then you got the the aluminium frame at the front.
These Vantec stealth fans were pretty good at the time.
You can see how tight it was fitting a graphics card in even with 3 hard drives installed
I still think it looked alright from the front. The only thing that ruined it a bit was that strip of chrome, which was the cheapest crappiest plastic and the rest was all solid aluminium
Since I couldn't fir any more than 3 hard drives in the actual HDD rack, I guess I had to resort to installing a 4th hard drive in the floppy bay
we still have this drive here actually. it is so slow by today's standards it's practically unusable.
Not sure what was going on here, some sort of changes i guess
Blue LED fan in the rear of the case.
Front of the case
I had another fan on the cpu cooler now. this time another one of those vantec UV ones but a solid one color version instead of the 2 color version from before.
This is also probably the neatest I ever had the case. I like these couple pictures a lot.
I like these red zip ties
There was a trick some people did back when hard drives used to face out into the case where route the sata cable in between the two drives and out the front to make it look neater.
I actually have a soft spot for these wire fan grilles. I kind of like the look of them to be honest.
This was definitely my favorite configuration i had in the case.
this is what the back panel looked like.
At one point I had some green and blue UV sleeving
I even reused this alien fan grille from the acrylic case on the cpu cooler at one point. obviously I was really bored.
You can also spot something else that was in the acrylic case which was that mutant mods bubble led tube thing up under the PSU and above the CPU
I'm going to have to stop here for now because I was way over the character limit and I had to break it up.
I have part 2 written up already and I will post it shortly
