Case Mod - In Progress Project: Predatory Instinct- Complete, pending final photos 6/2/13

D-Day:



Remember what I said about needing to assemble this in a certain ( unknown ) order, in order to make everything fit? Yeah, took a lot of head scratching, cursing & a couple attempts to tame Electronic Lord Cthulhu before I figured that I had to install the PSU before the PSU-wire cover plate. With that fitted & sleeved extensions ( turns out I didn't have any sleeved sata power cables, so just using the lead on the Seasonic PSU ) routed down through the notch, I started tearing into my current rig to pull out the HDD & ODD, along with the mobo speaker. Next up I checked over the socket on the new mobo to look for bent pins with a magnifying glass ( none found ), then installed the lovely new ram, CPU & mounted the venerable old Titan Fenrir ( which does an even better job in it's new home.. ) using the new retention bracket thingy. The only odd thing there was that I didn't ( couldn't ) need to use a back plate for the CPU cooler, it simply held in place from the rear with screws and washers- very solid and no mobo flex so I'm happy enough with that setup ( forgot to take pictures of those steps unfortunately ).

Next up I had to wrestle the mobo into the case, whilst trying not to get hooked up on the various front & top panel connections sticking up through the sort-of bottom plate ( like trying to fit an ATX mobo into an mini-ITX chassis... ). I got that done and started connecting up the various leads, only to find I needed one more usb 2.0 header than the mobo had available, but I do have a usb 3.0 header to put to use so more on that later. As luck would have it, or not, I didn't need to use any of the cable routing P-clips since the leads seem to have organized themselves almost perfectly thanks to the very short runs they make from A to B; I'll be selling the P-clips and loads more stuff from the old rig i the next few days so keep an eye out in the Sales section.

Anyway, with everything connected & double checked, I plugged in all the external leads, turned on the PSU & hit the power button; she lives! I entered the UEFI Bios and had a quick poke to set up the boot options & what-not, then exited to see if she would start up normally. Alas, my fears were borne out as she kept blue screening as soon as the windows logo / animation began. So, fresh install of Windows 7 Pro x64 and several hours of updates & downloading programs and I'm back up and running with my shiny new machine.



I've tested out the 670FTW graphics card by playing several sessions of Hawken with all settings turned up to Ultimate & set for 1920x1080, max temps are around ~75°C with the fan not going over 40% ( barely a quite hum ), not too shabby really. Frame rates are kinda hard to track as it's a live-view chart in the EVGA Precision-X software, though generally looks to be anything from ~40fps upto 110fps+ depending on how much action there is on screen. I'm not a bench marker really so I'm more than happy with the image quality & frame rates I'm getting, well worth the cost. Windows performance index reports scores from 7.5 to 7.8 for everything apart from the HDD ( 5.9 ), so that's great too

She isn't done quite yet though- still waiting on something special for the interior lighting ( which will be visible, despite the lack of case windows ), a few cables, and the side panel + front panel need to be repainted ( again, groan ) as they have magically picked up some nasty dirty marks from no-where whilst being carefully stored

Once those 3 things are sorted I will take some final pics and post up a complete parts list break down for those interested.

 

Penultimate update:

Project is now complete, pending final photos. The last thing to do was install the lighting after respraying the 2 panels yet again. I ordered a couple 'Angel eyes' LED rings from ebay designed to mount to car head lights to act as daytime running lights ( like Audi models often have these days ). Of course, it just turns out that they run from 12v DC and come in a range of sizes from ~60mm upto 180mm+ I believe, so I grabbed a couple 120mm items ( 2 only cost a few pence more than 1, go figure ). I also grabbed a single channel fan controller to adjust the brightness, then went to town with Mr Soldering iron...





I think it turned out rather well really