Hello Bit-Tech, after ages of being recommended to different forums and always being a bit afraid of coming here I finally took the leap. Some might recognize me from other places, for some this might be a new face. For you who haven't met me before, let me introduce myself. I stared modding about two years ago making a case mod for my father and the whole modding thing grew more and more addictive. After 6 months I stumbled upon Chares Harwoods blue MurderBox and fell in love. This was when I got my Lian Li V1000 and started a build called Crystal Clear, my first real modding experience. This was also the first time I stumbled upon MDPC-X, since we ordered straight from murderMod back in the days. After a growing friendship with both Charles and Nils I decided to do something I wanted to do for quite some time. As they have been my guidance through this experience, I wanted to "give something back", so this is a dedicated build to my dear friends, Charles Harwood and Nils Papke. Some graphical overview of the builds mentioned in the text above. My fathers computer. My Crystal Clear. I'll try to make this log as personal as possible given that the majority pictures are already snapped. Project Simplicity's current state as of 14th of December 2010:
HW; - Intel i5 750 - MSI P55M-GD45 - Corsair Dominator 1600mhz - XFX GTX260 - Corsair X32 SSD - Cougar 550w, sleeved with MDPC-X white, and a touch of Grande Bleu. LC: - EK Supreme LT - EK FC GTX 280 w/ EK-FC280 GTX RAM Backplate - EK Multioption RES 150 Rev.2 - EK ANTI-Cyclone - EK DDC X-Top Laing DDC V.2 - Feser Xchanger 120.2 - Laing DDC-Pump 12V DDC-1Plus (18w/620lph) - Masterkleer tubing with Fatboy fittings. Feser X-Changer 240. Got one of these buggers before they were phased out, loving it every bit. EK Supreme LT. 1/2" Fatboys. Some early planning of the HDD mounting location. The lovely MSI P55M-GD45, I later removed the mosfet logo and flipped the SB logo. Clearance'r'us. This is the actual space between the mounted radiator and the RAM. The EK GTX260 in the studio. Long nights with coffee and patience. Again some early planning almost one year ago. Now we're getting somewhere! Again, clearance is nothing that should be taken for granted. Used my beloved Dremel to make a hole in the grille. Version one of the pump-mount. The, at the time, newly introduced Cougar PSU.
Amazing orange colour, too bad it doesn't fit the theme. Snip, snip. Lengths be gone! Let there be sleeving! Since this was a pretty serious build, I decided that every cable should be either customized or made from scratch. Molex to sata pwr. I would like to thank Charles Harwood for these beautiful reservoir holders. Molex to molex and sata pwr for the SSD. The reading cable for the pump. Painted the Cougar PSU white. A bit more rawr then before. The Feser got some paint too!
Some beta-stage of the Himuro mounting. This was later scrapped. They should indeed be inside of the frame. The Noiseblocker had pretty bad soldering and while sleeving one cable came loose and the others not far behind, so I redid them all. Shortened cable for the front fan. Black-box in the making, houses everything fan-related. Molex to 3pin fan header. Nuclear physics one on one. The internal power cable, since the PSU is in the front.
Since I wanted something special and couldn't find a coolant I liked, I mixed my own shade of blue using Feser Blue and Feser Black premixes. After some experimenting, we have a match! Perfect. It was really hard since the tubing and the reservoir itself house different amounts of water, making the colour darker in the res. First idea of sata routing. Front panel cables. Used a drill and some files and got to work making slots for the cables to access the hard drives. Himuros mounted from above. Zip-ties begone! In the workshop at the time. Miss that place. This is a very bad take on how to route sata cables, today they run inside of the beam to the right. Made a slot for the SSD. Notice the flipped SB. Something is missing in this picture, can't really see what though. Painted RAM heatsinks. Gave the case a good semi-glossy polish. since I'm not a big fan of mirror finishes. The Himuros home where they belong. Front panel cables.
Holy RAMs! Filled up for the first time. Notice the pump/res chaos. I made an adapter that angles the reservoir at 45 degrees towards us. Before this picture was taken I cleaned the dining room for a good 2 hours, since the walls/floor/furniture might not be the proper place to drain Feser fluid. You could tell that to my pump. At least it looks better. Ah yeah, really fixed the bending problem with the pump/res right up. No problems there at all. With the Corsair 800D as inspiration, I made a replica window since I think it suits the case well. Black-box in use, no cable management at this point. Stealthy!
From this point on I only got 1000x667px pictures, so I'll separate them if it breaks the rules. Known things to be fixed is the legendary untameable angle of tilt on the pump/res combo. Also the 5,25" area is very raw, will make something out of it when I make up my mind on what. Then there is the cabling of course, and then some more custom cable adapters.
Beautiful mod, you must have infinite patience to sleeve all those wires.. Half the images are showing up broken for me though..
I had 4 broken when I wrote this log, now I have none. Maybe my images are still in the cache, but I think there is a problem with Imageshack today. We'll give at a couple of hours and if they are still broken I'll see if I can get them up on dropbox. Cheers!
Welcome to bit-tech Laine. Nice clean modding and beautiful photo's. You have a double post by the way.
Beautiful stuff as usual. Wat tubing do you normally use. t seems to be very clear. I use Masterkleer but it seems to cloud up quite fast.
Ah, another person who knows about MDPC-X... Isn't that rare nowadays, is it? Awesome, It's builds like these that make me wish I had the skill, time and money to make a MurderMod. This should be on million dollar pc!
Am I the only one who thinks there is a lack of pictures?? On a serious note: Really really nice and tidy! A very nice piece of work!
Beautiful work mate. I love Lian-Li's and your work makes them look even better, great attention to detail and colour schemes. Great job