Case Mod - In Progress project UVbomb (Nov 12 FINNISHED)

ok so for those who cant be bothered reading the whole plog (i know i cant) here is a link to the final picture post
http://forums.bit-tech.net/showpost.php?p=2145437&postcount=34



UV BOMB
Trials and tribulations of an epic first build




in the beginning there was beige. It was bad and so I came to pass that a mod was needed.

2 years ago I was a n00b. I knew nothing. Then one day i was given a smoke stained box full of circuit boards and wires. Until then i had divided my time between an increasingly laptop addicted (EX) girlfriend and a mk1 VW Golf. Lavishing love and attention on both in equal measure.


Eventually the time had come. I’d pretty much reached saturation point on the car there was just nothing more i could do to make it better (and it was cold working outside.)

Somebody gave me this box I mentioned. I knew not what it did. I’d never even turned one on before. Then I found this new fangled thing called the interwebz and to my surprise found it contained within it, more than just porn.

I used the guides I’d found to help me with putting right, the mass of wires and parts to make this ugly creamy brown box make noises. The first time i pressed the power button it worked.

IT WORKED!?!? I built an electrical item? Could I really have made this thing work?
Was this it? Was i now a geek? Could I wave bye bye to having sex?
Maybe, but I liked it.

It starts in the usual way, adding fans, lights messing around with wires that sort of thing.
But with barrow being the tiny little hick town that it is al the shops stocked nothing more than rainbow coloured fans that sounded like a plane had landed in my bedroom and lights that made it appear that a 3 year old had thrown up two bags of skittles into my box. But I didn’t know any better.




That was until I stumbled onto a little forum attached to a retailer’s web site.
http://forums.cclonline.com/
CCL was its name and the people were nice friendly helpful. They gave me some great ideas delivered my parts on time. Replaced any that didn’t work first time with no fuss and helped me source any parts they didn’t sell.

My box was getting better and better but still ugly and very unstable. This turned out to be a bit of a blessing as I learned very quickly how to fix a multitude of pc related problems.

This is how things stayed for a while in a constant loop of break fix and repeat until one day.

It was a beautifully sunny day, I was out in my car with my (EX) G/F who by now had assimilated her laptop and was quickly becoming some kind of Borg/GF hybrid.
I rounded a corner and out of the junction in front of me wobbled a man so old he knew Jesus personally. He stopped right in front of me then without a care in the world selected reverse and totalled my beautiful car.

I resisted the urge to beat him to a pulp on the ground that he was so old getting out of the car would have probably killed him any way, but this was an end to my car days which as i now had a company car was no problem to me. The insurance paid out a good sum and i decided i would ***** it all away on my new found wealth on my new found hobby.

i was going to spend the whole lot on my new rig so decided straight away that a clear case was the only way as spending all that money then shutting it all away never to be seen seamed stupid.

i bought the first clear case i could get my hands on. i knew i was going for high spec so my next purchase was a
HIPER TYPE R 580W PSU

 

Excellent story! Sorry to hear about the car However, new day new things!

*Edit* Subbed!

 

thanks man there`s more coming as i can find time to write it

 

stay tuned for the next instalment of..... OMG it F***in worked

My modding style back then consisted of buy all the bits and lob em in

I had the PSU and the case and put them all together with my creaky old Athlon xp1800 and bunged in all the skittle puke fans and cathodes as I ordered the rest of my parts.

i think you`ll agree it looked bloody awful

sorry for the crap picture camera phones were pretty dire when I started this log. The pictures will get better


CLL computers came to the rescue for most of my build,
From them i got

Intel core 2 E6600
Asus p5n-32 SLI mother board
2g XMS-2 5400 Ram
7900gt golden sample GPU


Still being a bit of a n00b at buying parts I’d selected a couple of duff items.
For instance I’d bought 675 MHz ram when I should have bought 800 MHz
I`d also banked on needing SLI at a later date (hindsight eh)

as i later found the mobo was pants in the OC department only manageing a paltry 2.7 ghz rom a 2.4ghz chip
luckily this soon died and CCL let me trade up for a better board at no extra cost

this time i got the awsome ASUS P5B deluxe wi-fi


Obviously the fans had to go and i went through a few before i found any that wouldn’t deafen my dog
I also upgraded the cooling with and arctic cooling freezer pro 7 and a Zalman full copper GPU fan


And added a second monitor




AND IT STILL LOOKED SHITE TO ME


Thing is I’m quite anal in nature and much to the amazement of most of my friends still didn’t like what i had done.

The case wasn’t right, the fans, way, way, way too small and too loud, the lighting was horrible, Way too bright and in your face..... I wanted subtle....... I wanted UV and I had to have it at any cost.

i found just the case a Sunbeam tech UV reactive Perspex in blue. Only problem was I couldn’t (at the time) find a UK stockist. I tried for months to get one until someone pointed me in the direction of PC Look. com
Ok so it was French but they had a selection of parts and modding equipment the likes of which i have never seen in this country and they shipped to the UK even if they were cheese eating surrender monkeys. (If I’m wrong please link me)

Any way €200 later and my case was on its to this country with a couple of Sunbeams UV cathode rimmed fans and a scythe Kama bay

It seemed to take weeks for them to arrive but as soon as they did I knew I had made the right choice

The quality of the sunbeam tech case far surpassed the old one


The fans were also great and lit the case beautifully, although it still looks very bright in the photos, UV light doesn’t travel very far so unlike my last effort I didn’t have to worry about any passing planes mistaking me for a good parking spot


Any way that’s all for now.
Coming soon is
1. Me shitting myself while cutting holes in my brand new 200 euro imported case
2. modding of the drive cages.
3. A complete flip of the whole case to allow the PSU to sit at the bottom of the case, the GPU to blow heat the easy direction.
4. The drives to be mounted to face out of the side panel on the case
All these mods were to make space for the water-cooling

Tune in soon for the next installment of..... looooooooooooooost innnnnnnn caaaaaaaaase!

 

Ok so my case has arrived and its time to start modding.

A. Cut the side panel to fit the drives and fan control. (A worrying task in a £200 case)

B. Flip the rest of the panels so the motherboard and GPU sit upside down.

C. Make space for the PSU in the bottom of the case instead of the top. Move the HDDS to make
space for the rad underneath the drives.

D. pre-empt where all the wiring needs to go.
The plan is to convert the case so everything faces out the side panel.
So I needed to convert the drive cage to be east facing, cut holes in the side panel to allow the disk drive and fan control to be accessible

now I’ve always planned to water cool this rig so the first thing was to work out where everything was gonna go.
no mean feat in a see through case this size, every inch was gonna be seen and every cut had to be pin straight and millimetre perfect.

with this in mind I knew a dremal wasn’t going to cut it so to speak and not wanting to spend money on expensive tools I sent the side panel off to a local sign maker who after much badgering and threatening to nail his hand to his laser cutter finally managed to find the time to cut my holes for the case side.


While this was being done I made a start on modding the drive cage to accept the new parts.
i cut down the top part of the cage and fitted the Scythe Kama bay and painted CD drive at the top

Then fitted this all back into the case


In the time I was waiting for the glue to drive I knocked up a quick sketchup of how I wanted things to be (I’m no expert with sketch up )


one thing I was certain of is wiring up this case and hiding it all was gonna be a feat, so to give me some extra space i used some 3/4 inch mobo stand offs to fix the back side of the case on. this gave and extra inch of space behind the mobo where I can hide all the wires and inverters for the lights





i`m a bit short on pics here as this build has been on going for a while.
i fact so long it out lasted a relationship
the case went back together pretty quickly after this

but its still not right still too bright
stick with it as it does get better later trust me



this is pretty much how things stayed for a year due to money and women issues. in that time i`d started a buisness, moved three times, been with out netz for 6 month, lost a job an lost a girlfriend. (no great loss)

although i knew what i wanted to do i just didnt have the reasourses. i used to sit and just picture what i wanted going over every minute detail in my head.

but it wasnt untill i met a girl(never learn) that the fire for it started in me again.
it started by building a very cheap networked media centre for the bedroom, inside a 15 quid bed side cabinet.
it comprised of an
asus an8 moterboard i had knocking around
athlon 64 3000
some ram (oboviously)
and my old 32 inch tv
i didnt put much effort into it as it didnt need to be pretty just quiet and discrete.


this had the knock on of starting up my hobbie again and soon i was back online searching endlessly for the parts i`d had in mind all this time, while not even knowing if they existed

i still had on a load of stock left over from my ex partners shop so decided to recoup some of my losses and stick the lot on ebay.
i now had enough money in paypal to start spending

over the coming months i bought

a bargain GTX 260 oc
master klear tube
swiftech apogee CPU water block
mcw55 GPU block (very old but cheap)
swiftech micro res
swifetch pump
8 ac ryan uv blue green fans
another two gig of corsair ram
GPU Ram sinks
Fazer 1 acid green fluid
drive mounts, tube fittings, ide converters, hose clips
you name it i wanted every thing ready before i started my build.

 

Like it Excellent idea on the wiring space!

 

o i can see you`ve been reading lol.

thanks man i have to say its made this build a whole lot easier.
the asus board i have also has a special feature where it transfers heat to the back of the board. i`m not so sure how effective it is but the extra space allows it to do its thing i suppose

 

Sure have I'll be here, waiting...

 

i`ll try and post some updates tonight i got a bit o time on my hands. i`ll smoke a pole and get writing

loving your work by the way

 

OK so it time for some more updates.

I`ve started wiring up my project but it dawned on me the power supply fan stands out a bit with the rest of the fans being UV green and blue. luckily watercooled-pcs sent me one to many fans so I had a spare lying around and a bit of psu modding later we have a new PSU fitted and ready to go


before

after


my fingers were at least a couple of mm longer before this mod but i don't like the fan grill it just don't look right so i`ll live with the fact that i`ll just have stumps for fingers by the time I`m finished this build


any way as you can see the wiring has started (i wont bore you with too many photos lol)


thing is the hard drives can fit where they are cos the rad is going in there and I hate IDE cable there just so ugly.

rather than spend £100 on new drives though i found these on Ebay for a bargain price of £1.50


For those who don't know there IDE-SATA converters. they will work perfect for the DVD and storage HDD as my boot drive is already SATA so this will save me a lot of time when it come to trying to hide those ugly ass cables




I really need to get cracking on this build my girlfriend is getting rather pissed at the state of the living room I have parts all over the place and my desk is covered in pc bits


this is my computer at the mo working well but its a little worrying leaving it like this with a two year old running around



and one VERY understanding missus

 

Nice PSU Took the grill off mine too, no need! Didn't know they made ide-sata converters. Bought a sata dvd writer doh!

Know how you feel I've got boxes and bits everywhere at the moment, wife is not impressed

 

Yeah I'm watching this now.
Just read everything from the beginning and think the log its brilliant.
Hate UV cases but your concept and attitude make me like this case.
Keep it up dude

 

there very handy and for the price I cant complain. its not just the buying new drives its the whole re-install and transferring all my music, movie's an games over.

you do need to power both the drive and the converter separately though so it means a few extra wires.
ergh i hate wires lol

need a new hard drive though cos i`m running out of space fast. I`m looking into a 1TB samsung F1 for storage and a nice intel or OCZ SSD. having said that i`m also looking into buying a ferrari but that ant ever gonna happen either


edit aw thanks el rando. thats really nice.

i know there a bit old hat now but due to money (and women problems{not any more) it been on-going for years just doing a bit at a time.
hopefully i`ll end up with something original

 

after measuring up it dawned on me that the rad wont fit with the drives the way they are so my only option was a re-design of the drive bays



I`ve had to cut down one side and swap the position of the Reobus and DVD drive. this gives me enough room to push one of the hard drives up behind the fan controller witch gave me an extra few mm I need for the rad athough i have had to use some hard drive mounts to fit the drives into the 5.25 bays



so its time to crack on with fitting the fans an rad in place and re-wire it all to save space.

now i`m no sparky so this was a bit of a mare for me being my first time. i just had to hope that common sense would get me through.

the rad may missus bought me for being a bloody nice BF

fans fitted


first time around i tried to wire all four rad fans into one output on the fan controller but as the LCD screen and the fan control are all powered from one molex.
wiring all the rad fans into on output caused the internal fan alarm to spaz out all the time and keep shouting at me.
so in the end i ran the front rad fans into fan 1 and the rears into fan 2.

i`v also gutted some 120mm fans, taken out the blades and motors and used the casings as shrouds. this acts to pull the fans back from the rad slightly.
it lessens the affect of the natural dead spot in the middle of each fan



and now this all slots perfectly into the drive bays. still a bit move wire management to go but its coming on fast now


its still a tight fit as the drain plug on the rad sticks out of the bottom but a small hole drilled in the bottom of the case will allow this to stick through and help when it comes to draining the system for cleaning

 

Should look good Wow, that has got to be the most fans I've ever seen on one rad!!

 

there is only actually four fans, two each side but i`ve gutted four others.
i`ve taken the fans out of them and i`m just using the casing as shrouds as it pulls the fans back from the rad slightly eliminating the affect of the dead spot in the middle of the fans.

it was horrible buyin brand new fans knowing full well i was gonna rip them apart any way. i did have some old ones knocking about but they were all different colours and would have thrown out my colour scheme

 

right where was i... oh yes...

i`m full of cold atm so i thought i`d take the day off work (yay self employment)
and get cracking on the log

i offered every thing up to the case and with all the stuff in the drive bay arrangement its putting quite a bit of weight and stress on the case its self, so after lots of searching i found the correct glue to give me seamless joints.

i started by stripping back the case (AGAIN) and masking up any areas that dont need glue on them, so when i join the pieces the glue spread will only end up on the masking tape.

this stuff is very thin and can be applied with a syringe.
all i needed to do was join the two bits lay a tiny line along each bit and let capillary action draw in the glue where its needed.

this stuff actually fuses the two pieces together and any extra just evaporates in to the air so you cant even tell it been glued

i then taped all the corners to give a bit of pull on the pieces clamped where i could and left it all to dry over night

i then realised i`d glued the back panel on upside down. (technically its on the right way but not the way i need it)
this is now the left side panel of the case which will be out of view and covered from the inside with mirror film

so now its time to get all this back in the case and start the final stretch






something is missing from this log i feel
oh yes that's it... the obligatory mascot shot

"please can we go out now, i need to pee"


any way i digress.

i now needed my mother board to size everything up, so i had to take the bones out of my bedroom media centre so i wasn't disconnected from the netz should i have a question.

its one thing to have parts and mess all over the house but if i cut off the missus facebook access she`d have my balls in a chopping block

its not big its not fast but it works. just like me



so in goes the motherboard (the eagle eyed will notice the mounts for the CPU water block already in place


and the GPU has been robbed of its ugly ass cooler and fitted with ram sinks.
these seam a little flimsy but short of a full cover block (i`m not made of money) not really sure what i can do. i`m sure as the cure they`ll stick better (EDIT: they did)


now i`d got al this back together it was just a case of working out where and how the tubes were going to fit and sorting any clearance issues

none so far. it coming together now

next up is to cut the fan holes in the front and back of the case.
now i`m shite with a jigsaw so i`m not sure how i`m gonna do this.
being so exposed and so far into the build if i mess this up its back to square one
but you`ll just have to wait and see

 

I'd use a coping saw and then a half-round file, I know I'd wreck it with power tools, More more, and where has the story gone???

 

not much more story to tell mate its pretty much standard build from here on in. i`m off out for a while so i`ll review and edit later on for ya

this build has been ongoing for years so the story dont really fit past the first half of the build. so much has changed in that time.
i`ll get on with it

 

woody just for you i`ve edited the story back into some of the posts mate.

dont blame me you asked for it lol.

i`ll keep it coming fast. gotta do some actual work this week end though so next post will be sunday/monday i guess