Tiger Style - A build log

[w3bbo]

Lighting pt1

I originally planned to go all black with black tubing for this build with some descrete white lighting but as the U2-UFO is more of an 'in your face' case I think it looks a little sterile for my tastes with such sublime styling.

So as the name suggests I have gone for an orange and black look. Sourcing orange lighting is a total pain and I see now why it isn't a very popular colour to go for. Just about the only lighting I could find are orange led's and even those wern't pre wired so I decided to do it myself .

I picked up a few LED's from Maplins and scrounged a few of a couple of friends. Some turned out to be amber coloured which didn't really suit my needs others were the ones I was looking for so on with the testing. I intended to use the LED's in the alphacool pumps and the bayres's to light up the plexiglass as without any lighting or UV fluid plexi will look dull so here goes:

Heres a template of the 2 bayres's I intend using with the holes marked for the led's :

With the wires cut to length I temp attached them to the led's along with a resistor and then wired it up to 12v and ground on the molex (yellow and black).

Once soldered up and sleeved I then went about fitting the led's to the res which is pretty much the look I was hoping for

 

[w3bbo]

Lighting pt2

Cathodes.

Apart from the obligitory UV cathodes (AC Ryan x4) which will hopefully show up some orange UV I have going on inside the case I wanted to light up the fan grills so the fans on the front look orange but dont look 'cheap' like the thermaltake fans. I know you can gt orange yates but they didn't look right in my rig.

So I came up with the idea of using orange cathodes inside the fan shroud - problem being that orange cathodes are hard to come by so the nearest I could get were red. When I say 'red' I should say advertised as red but were more like pink. Never mind I just used some yellow permanent marker pen and gave the cathodes a few coats and now they are looking more orange. Still perhaps more red than orange but they were alot better than when they were stock.

I fitted them each side of the shroud behind the fans and fan grills/filter so they shine through the fans without being too obtrusive.

I'm still not totally convinced and I might even go for a set of white cathodes and use some orange vinyl to get the desired effect but they will do for the time being.

 

[w3bbo]

I decided to treat myself with this build and bought a couple of new HD's.

I have heard some good reports about the new 32mb 7200.11's so I plumped for a pair to be used in Raid 0. I also hear these drives are quiet but I have my doubts they are as quiet as my current spinpoints but nonetheless I mounted them as I had previously done, using anti vibration rubber mounts which, if there is any, should cut down on any chatter the drives make.

I also have another drive nestled inbetween to use as a data drive. These hard drives were then mounted to a fan using MM's own hard drive rack which is a handy little bit of kit as this serves to keep them running nice and cool.

 

[BloomerzUK]

Looking nice mate.

There's something amazing look at HDDs in a rack like that.. Dunno must be me.

 

[w3bbo]

Tubing So this is where it starts to take shape now....finally!

I originally planned to use feser dye in the loop to get a nice orange glow to the tubes but the feser I used previously didn't turn out to be the orange I was looking for, more like murky green/brown if you ask me :

It may just have been a bad batch though as other feser products I have used have been fine. So reluctant to try another bottle the solution was to use XSPC orange tubing which glows nicely under UV. I would be using two loops though which meant I really needed (or rather wanted) to distinguish between the two loops. The only other colour I could really choose was black. So here they are :

Still got alot of work to do yet but it's nice to see a little clolour in there at last.

 

[w3bbo]

I like the look of the fat tubing as thin tubing just looks 'wimpy' imo. But as we all know a Tiger has stripes so I used some primo coils to get the look I was after :

 

[Luigi]

nice work, can i ask where you got the black tygon from?

 

[Socks]

Looking nice. I love the contrast between the orange and black.

I found that the orange feser coolant looked really good. Mind you..It wasnt as UV reactive as id hoped but still it gave a nice effect.

 

[SuB]

absolutely amazing build log and a fantastic orange/black theme.. very jealous.. making me want to pull mine down and re-do the loop better

sick of green now lol

 

[w3bbo]

nice work, can i ask where you got the black tygon from?

Not sure if I'm allowed to post links m8 for the Black Tygon due to shops already on the forum but Google is your friend.

 

[Luigi]

Ok, well since neither WCUK or aqua-pcs have it AFAIK im sure you can post a link.. i can only find it on specialtech

 

[w3bbo]

Sunbeam rheobus LED Mod

Sadly my Scythe Karma meter gave up the ghost due to me asking too much of it. I needed to run 9 120mm fans off it and while it was ok for a couple of days it eventually gave up the ghost. Tbh I was a little gutted because its about the only black fan controller that has the capability to glow orange.

As a replacement I got the Sunbeam rheobus fan controller which while not being anywhere near as fancy as the Scythe it is renown for being one of the most powerfull controllers around so if this couldn't handle 9 fans nothing would. The Sunbeam has 20W per channel, of which there are four whereas the Scythe is only 7w per channel - so more than double the power.

The problem with the sunbeam is that at stock it looks a little cheap (it is tbh @ £14.99) and not only are the led's the wrong colour for my build they are also extremely bright!

So I set about taking it to bits to see what could be done.

Well its very basic inside apart from the huge heatsinks to cope with the power going through the rheobus and as luck would have it the LED's will pop straight out so are easily changeable. The problem being is that the LED's are dual type and sadly getting orange and another colour that don't clash is nigh on impossible. Heres what I figured out after a little testing which may help anyone who gives this simple mod a try.

As you look at it front side on the left prong is 0-7v, middle Gnd, and right 7-12v.

 

[w3bbo]

So as I couldn't find any dual led's to my liking, I used 4 amber and 4 orange ones which were a pain to solder (need to connect the Ground terminal on both leds). I wired them up thus : 0-7v = Amber and 7-12v Orange, which brought the rheobus much more inline with the theme of this build.

ITS ALIVE!!!!!

Looks much nicer now and best of all I no longer burn my retinas when looking at the damn thing.

The Drive bay area is pretty much complete now, just need to sort the power/reset buttons :

 

[nepas]

looking good mate,how long till we see some finished pics

 

[w3bbo]

Got a few more bits and bobs to do but nothing major now.. Need a couple of more led's for the pumps and I'm also waiting for the powdercoated fan grills to arrive. I also need to finish off the OCZ ram cooler that I started.

 

[tinytomlogan]

I didnt think about changing the leds in the one I have that came with the MM I bought on here recently.

Looks good though dude I like it.

Keep the updates coming

 

[jordan835]

That looks really nice, and i love the tiger stripes on the tubing, genius:yumyum:

 

[Bungral]

Didn't fancy the Zalman 6 channel fan controller and change the LEDs in that?

 

[w3bbo]

No because the Zalman is low on power output too and I already blew one fan controller coz of power draw. Both the Scythe and the Zalman are 7w opposed to the Sunbeams 20w

 

[Kerotan]

This Build is awesome... I once had plans of modding some Orange LEDs into an HP Kayak (don't ask lol) but I never got round to it. Still got the LEDs but I doubt I'll use em now - I'm all for the blue lighting since I got a 900, but it's cool to see something different + I may get different coloured fans when it's time to change the TriCools at some point. Keep up the good work