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Case Mod - In Progress Carbide - 98% Complete!

Discussion in 'Project Logs' started by Furball Zen, 16 Oct 2012.

  1. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Well as really none of you know I got divorced, and for the past year plus she has been without a main PC because i sold off the 939 system I built for her with the intention of quickly replacing it. Money problems got in the way of getting my new stuff to gift my DFI 790FX to her. I really hate to give it up because it is such a rock solid board, but the only thing i can do with it now is make a server or such out of it due to hardware limitations.

    So, on to the list of parts. I did not intend for this to happen, but Corsair is the main brand for a lot of the components. I was going to reuse the case she had, but slide a Swiftech 360 rad on the side panel, but some complications with fitment and additional cost involved made me start looking for a case that would work, and that she could clean with relative ease once in her new house.

    I happened across the Corsair Carbide Series on Newegg for a whopping $94 after rebate. This is a larger mid size case with some serious muscle and options for the modder minded. I wont do a review as the one on NE was what sold me on the case. The size is large enough to actually fit a 360 in the front or on the top with some modifications, but more than i really wanted to do, so ill be using my older Black Ice 240 and if needed the Swiftech 120 rad im using on my laser cutter. I think the 240 will work fine as the CPU, SB and vid card will be the only pieces, im using a Thermalright IFX on the NB since it can heat up the loop pretty good.

    Components list:
    DFI 790FX mobo with modded Thermalright HR-05IFX on the NB chip
    AMD 5000+ Black Edition 2.6GHz CPU OC'd to 3.3-3.4GHz
    4 gigs of Corsair XMS2 DHX DDR2
    Sapphire HD4860 (cut down 4890)
    Corsair Carbide 500R case in Graphite
    Coolermaster R4 case fans in red
    Corsair CX430 PSU
    HW Labs Black Ice 240 rad
    Swiftech Apogee GT (CPU)
    Swiftech MCW30 (SB)
    Swiftech MCW60 (Video)
    Swiftech MCP355 (pump)

    Onto some pics

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    This is all i have for now :)
     
    Last edited: 30 May 2013
  2. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Update. Got most of the assembly done, waiting on my first Xoxide order since they sold the business. Need the tubing to tie it all together, and some minor wiring to make it all work.

    Had to get creative in mounting the 240 rad due mainly to its sheer size. Its too thick to fit up top where a slim 240 rad would, its too tall to fit in the front without completely taking out the entire 5.25" drive bay.

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    The top fans and a cable management port that just happened to fit a fill port without modification. One thing i did not want to do a lot of with this case, although i could have gone hog wild and still would like to and make some nice accessories to sell.

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    Artsy view of the 24pin through the drive bay.

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    5.25" bay res i just happened to have that will work perfectly. Inlet and outlet and fill port inlet. Will have a single red LED lighting it up.

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    24 and 6 pin sitting in a cable comb i was 'dared' to make and they turned out really well. Can fit 3 wires deep in each channel and the smaller ones can fit 2.

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    4 channel comb with the 8pin mobo connector.

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    Backside of the drive bay.

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    Heres a full frontal. You can see the DVD, twin 40 gig Intel SSD's and WD Black 2.5" 320gb drive. The SSD's will be in RAID1 with the lappy drive as backup and major program storage. This way if one of the SSD's die the full image will be on the other plus backed up on the 320gb. This was not meant to be a low power consumption rig, but aside from the 5000+ and 3850 (replacement for the 4860) there wont be much power used.

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  3. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Dont know what happened, i swear i only hit the Submit Post button once.
     
    Last edited: 17 Oct 2012
  4. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    319 views and im the only one replying to my own thread? LOL

    Man, it really sucks having OCD when all you do is ruin material and end up finding out that something wasnt made with the same OCDness. I spent the better part of 4 hours trying to make a template to cut out a window from 1/8" acrylic to replace the mesh in the side panel, which was inset 1/8". Soooo... i get it just right and go to test the template (AGAIN! 5th time) and it freaking turns out that the hole in the panel ISNT CUT SQUARE!!!

    So i ended up cutting the 'ledges' off and had enough (+14" to spare) C-channel and trimmed the edge and mounted the red window.

    Had to get a bit creative with what materials i had laying around...

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  5. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Got some more work done last night, still dont have the tubing. Only thing left is tubing, water and 2 power cables for the drives.

    Figured out how/where i wanted to mount the pump, the LED's are coming off the HDD indicator circuit. To the right you can see the disassembled Aerocool Gatewatch 2 which will monitor the water and case temps and control the rad fans (i hope).

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    Couple shots of the wiring. Still some zip ties to do and i ran out of the red doing the PSU way back when, so i decided to use some more purple for the remaining sleeving.

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    Wire management for the upper fans and front controller panel. In the bottom you can see the custom loop temp sensor and power LED in the res. Ironically all 5 ports are used, but the top fill port is not and wont be.

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    Upper left hand corner shows the case temp sensor, should be a bit warmer there i hope so i dont get false readings.

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    Full frontal.

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  6. ziza

    ziza What's a Dremel?

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    You have a very sweet sleeve there.
     
    Furball Zen likes this.
  7. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Thanks!
     
  8. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Here are a couple teasers till later (hopefully) :)

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  9. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Well, ill be getting Carbide back (ex didnt want something 'high maint' so i gave her an FM2 mATX air cooled box) and itll be time to do a config change, swap some colors out and then ill use it for my WHS box.

    Color scheme (UV colors never get old with a DFI board hehe) and the rads that ill be using

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    I have almost all the PSU sleeved but no pics yet as i need more SATA passthrough connectors and im not sure if ill need a 4 pin Molex line. Im also waiting on the proper orange paracord as the stuff in the pic is from a different manufacturer and isnt the same weight as the yellow even though it says 550 on it.

    the rads are all Swiftech and the funky stack is made possible with one of the older stackable 120's and then since i got a really good deal on two 120 reg rads i stacked one and the other will go on the back before the CPU. I also have an XSPC dual bay single DDC res that ill be using instead of the current plexi topped pump.
     
  10. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Lots of work got done over the weekend im glad to say. I stripped the sleeving off of the Corsair CX430 and swapped it to another Antec TPQ-850 (same PSU ive had since i got the DFi mobo) and added the orange sleeving. I also chewed through roughly $25 of 1/2" plexi trying to make an AM2 mount for my Swiftech Apogee GTZ waterblock. I wanted to use this for a while even though its overkill, but i also wanted to use this as my main PC for a while so i can RMA my Gigabyte 990FXA as it keeps dropping my RAID randomly killing off one drive till i rebuild it. Took a while to get the mount made using only a drill and router :)

    Im not done with it as im going to frost the surface so the 4 LED's will light it up better. This is done using a fine grit sandpaper to just rough the surface, ill probably use a 220 grit.

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    Ok PSU sleeving time :) The orange is a bit more UV reactive than the yellow so in some spots it looks red. I didnt want to adjust anything with Photochop so just deal with it :) I have also perfected the sleeveless look and can get great results the first time.

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    Some motherboard shots to show the difference between this iteration and the 'beginning' one. The first noticeable change is the addition of a thermo-controlled 70mm fan on the Thermaltake IFX chipset cooler. I have two of these fans that i got way back when i first started in wc-ing when i got the Coolermaster Duo Viva back in late 2008.

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    Here you can see the sleeving pretty well and how i mounted it using zip ties.

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    (Jaws theme music...) in come the twin Sapphire 4890s (factory OC edition) cooled with Swiftech water blocks! I was saving these for my FX build (UFO ^3) but realized that i couldnt flip the tops like i intended due to how the pins are cut for flow, they dictate that it must be oriented like this :( Oh well, once i decided i was going to use these, i grabbed the TPQ-850 and found a good price 955BE CPU to really hot rod this out, since like i said itll be my main rig again for a while.

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    Clearance between the IFX and first 4890.

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    Installed the PSU and started some wire management. When mocking it up the 8 pin CPU cable was a bit tight taking out to the back of the mobo tray so i wanted to see if i could get a bit more length going behind the mobo itself. Worked out pretty good as you can see. Had to drill a few holes for zip ties to keep it 1 wire thick. I had to drill 3 more at the bottom to keep it flat and away from the mobo standoff.

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    No interference with the mobo installed.

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    Plenty of room :)

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    Bottom of mobo

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    XSPC DDC Res and fan controller.

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  11. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    3100 views and only one reply? Thanks for the support :-\

    Small update

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  12. Waynio

    Waynio Relaxing

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    Looking good & zingy. :)

    Think I might know why there are few comments, takes a while to load the pictures & I'm on unlimited 80MB/s fibre, either the hosting of the pictures or the size of them or both & maybe people getting impatient waiting, I think that's what it will be.

    I take my pictures in big res & the only editing I do is re size & occasionally crop them in mspaint to 800 for the biggest dimension, it's a bit of faffing about but makes them load fast & seems to be much more appreciated everywhere, I would prefer to post at 1000 to 1400 as the biggest dimension but 800 seems to be preferred.

    I noticed with batch size converters it wrecks the quality of the images quite a lot so I go through each one at a time using good & free mspaint, suffers no quality loss but makes the size go from 4MB to 150KB to 500KB, just a little extra prep work on the log, you get used to it eventually. :D
     
  13. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Well i dont know what the issue is then, maybe cause most or a lot of you are over the pond. No one over here complains on any of the other forums? Even though the pics were all 200k and smaller i reduced them to 1024x768 but i wont maintain separate copies for each forum.
     
  14. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Update ya say? Ok. A small one.

    Start of a VRM cooler using some of the mesh from the side panel

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    Lapping the 955 to 1000 grit. Going any further is not needed as getting it flat and smooth is better than shiny. Both surfaces are so flat there is a slight suction when pulling them apart.

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    Swiftech GTZ to same 1000 grit :)

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  15. flame696

    flame696 Terminating People Since 1980....

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    Dot worry about comments just keep going its coming on nicely especially the orange/yellow sleeving keep up the god work
     
  16. Guest-23315

    Guest-23315 Guest

    I miss DFI :waah:
     
  17. Father-Time

    Father-Time Minimodder

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    Very good sleeving, whats the plastic thing holding them, did you call it a comb or something...
    Coming on nicely so far.
     
  18. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Thanks :)

    I know, right? Some of their engineers went to Sapphire, but i cant for the life of me find a place to buy a 990FXA like Bill used in Mayhem!

    Its called a cable comb, for lack of a better term. A guy at OCN needed something like that and i whipped up the design and he was quite happy, but as you can see they work pretty good :)

    I also received my new side and front panels from Corsair today, fairly cheap too! I needed a couple bay covers and it was only $14.99 for the whole assembly or $4.99 per cover... no brainer there. I snagged a new side panel so i can put a proper window in it.
     
  19. Laine

    Laine This and that

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    Love this vibrant build. Solid colour choice and I really like the older components. Really miss the 2008-09-ish LC-"fashion" if you will. This will surely be a worthy time machine. :)
     
  20. Furball Zen

    Furball Zen Shut up and Mod

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    Wow, thanks! Coming from you thats a HUGE compliment :)
     

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