Project Mountain Scorpion Big thanks to Foxconn for their help so far General Overview Well where to begin...... Have been at this system building for quite some time now, and historically most of my systems have been a little 'same old stuff different case'. Lots of UV lighting, UV Parts, etc. Picked up a Mountain Mods UFO case a while back and carried on doing the same old mods to it. Well after a few mishaps, I figured it was time to start doing something a little more interesting. Bit of history on the current build, everything was working properly until a BSOD and then a complete fail to POST under any circumstances, after looking through the ASUS forums I found some other people who had had the same issue and had had their boards replaced. Mine being very touch and go from a warranty point of view, and ASUS not exactly being the best warranty provider in the UK (Anyone with their own issues with ASUS directly on components, let me know and I'll point you in the right direction), I got some assistance from a close friend in Foxconn who is rather nicely sending me an unreleased P45 Avenger board to get this system up and running again so I can get the project moving. The old board was a P5-N32SLI-SE Deluxe, here as a dead board. I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the UK with a Core 2 Duo processor and at the time I was using a pair of 6800 Ultras so I needed a board that could run the new Core 2's with SLI capabilities. Took me 3 months to find a board that could do it. It was based on an old Nforce 4 intel edition chipset with reworked VRM's and a BIOS tweak which needless to say didn't exactly work very well and its overclocking capabilities were absolutely rubbish. Anyway, this is what's left of the board after me stripping everything off. And my shiney Core 2 Extreme engineering sample Well here's the case in all its glory ready to get cracking. Apologies about some of the cabling, its a bit all over the place but this is just from me trying to get the system started after the last little mishap. The Plan I'm going to be honest with you all, I have spent lots of time reading through other peoples project logs. From this I have taken lots of inspiration and will be trying to put it to use in this slightly unusual chassis. I don't mean to take anyone's ideas, and I will try to give credit to the person that I originally saw the concept from if I can remember where I found it first. Unfortunately I'm not the most creative person in the world and I have to work with what I've got. Right apologies out of the way, lets get the good stuff running. Anyone who's seen one of these cases before will know just how big it really is, 18” Cube. Its massive, there is room enough inside, even with the windows on it for 7 120mm Fans, and 3 80m behind the HDD cage. Historically its had 2 rads in it, a single 120mm rad, and a 120.3 rad on the other side. It worked well before and I can see me sticking with it going forward.(esp since I still have the rads) The case itself is split into 2 halves, the side with the triple rad and the motherboard tray is for that only, creating a great airflow from front to back with nothing getting in the way. The other side is for the front 5.75 bays, the hard drive cage, pump, PSU etc. There is an extra space for a second PSU where it would normally sit on a standard ATX case on the other side. Just a bit of space for Fans Some interesting wiring Temporary Cooler for the chip So the plan going forward is to create a glossy black and red themed case with some spot red lighting, conceal as much as possible, and give the case a really cool but subtle colour scheme. For the first time in my building history there's going to be NO UV The build is going to be built as follows: Foxconn Avenger P45 Motherbard 4Gb G.Skill Dual Channel Ripjaws DDR3 16000 Good for 2000Mhz at CAS9 Asus 9800GTX+ 2 x WD Raptor 36Gb 2 x WD 300Gb Caviar 400Gb Seagate and 500Gb Samsung for storage Creative Xfi Extreme Gamer Eventually, I'm going to rebuild on the following Core i7 (not sure which yet, think of that when the budget is available) Foxconn Bloodrage x58 board. (matches the colour scheme) Either a GTX 295 or HD5870 but the rebuild will be the first to go back to being watercooled, I can't do that, as my current water blocks don't fit current hardware, and I'm not spending with a view to changing them again soon after. (Got quite a bit of Danger Den kit lying round, CPU, 2x VGA and northbridge and southbridge water blocks) Lets get some fish tank pump The fans I have atm. Some specifics that I'm planning to do: Swapping the acrylic panels with some see-through red panels Building a motherboard shroud out of the same material. Removing the stickers from all media and colour coding them to match the case. In particular I'm thinking of painting the raptors in red with some kind of raptor reference on the top of the drive and an identifier to tell me which drives are which. Adding vandal-proof switches with red LED lighting to the front. Scorpion logo's to be added to the front and on both side windows. Watercooling liquid to be dyed red, Cable tidying to be in gloss black (possibly split loom, not sure yet) Custom cylindrical acrylic resevoirs mounted to the top of the case, with filler caps at the top Put some red LED lighting under the motherboard to give the board a red glow from underneath. Some kind of cover to hide the pump from sight, will probably have to scratch build it since its not that common a pump. The fan shrouds will be swapped for something that matches the theme. That's most of the ideas I've got so far, any suggestions would be more than welcome, and I'm definitely going to need some help along the way having never worked with acrylic before but we'll get to that soon enough. Anyway, nice package arrived this morning with some bits to get this started This stuff is a bargain at only about £70 for 4Gb of 2000MHz DDR3 and it matches the colour scheme (all important of course) And a retention bracket as my old one was ruined taking it off the old board. Should be expecting another box tomorrow containing the avenger board. No warranty and no new BIOS will be available, but I guess thats going to be part of the fun. I'll update with the arrival of the new board and getting the system running again. As long as the misses hasn't stolen the laptop again Any feedback or ideas would be great. Looking forward to getting this started.
i know that feeling, get up grab a drink to suddenly find a female appear in my chair signing into facebook!
in her words it is her laptop.... the amount of times i leave the room, come back to hear farmtown style sounds is incredible. If I so much as stop typing she steals it off me
thats not a bad idea.... ...sorry for delay in update, ran into a few problems getting this thing running, will update as soon as I have something to put up. Has to be said, this motherboard is really nice, BIOS settings are amazing, pretty much everything is editable
Just a quick update, project isn't dead. I have a massive update to do, and I promise to get all the picture riddled goodness up from the last 6 months as soon as I can find an hour or 3 to get it all written up and uploaded
