looks great, been watching since the beginning turned out much better then I thought it could. Makes me want to go on ebay right now.
Thanks guys. Actually, both sides are in the pics, but I need to get better ones. These were "wipe it down and try to fire it up" shots. I had been down for 3 days doing final assembly and had to get back on my sites/server before I had problems. The box had not been really cleaned, or even checked to see if it was actually running, In fact I nearly burned up the northbridge as the lead had stopped the fan. Ooops! About burned my finger when I touched it. As for the sides, actually you are seeing both sides. The well lit drive side ones came out blurry. This weekend I should be able to get a decent set of pictures. It is very difficult to photograph being black and mirrored.
Very nice job,it's understated like most well engineered/designed pieces should be.Let the parts and workmanship speak for themselves. I've read the thread 2 times now looking for the res and haven't seen a shot of it nor a mention of what/where it is.Am I looking in the wrong places? Just spotted you're from Missourri,my fiance is from just outside a small town called Concorde,I'll be moving over there once we're married so maybe you could set up a "modding master class" for me
Thanks Not so sure about modding master, but like they say, "a man is only as good as his tools". Glad I have lots of tools There is a res, sort of. It is the vertical fill tube between the fans and the radiator. It is all you really need. Most resevoirs are not very good, many just put bubbles back into the system, or are too shallow to keep the noise down. Bay res are some of the worst. You want a tall one so the bubbles can get up and out of the flow. Also being a HIGH flow system a res would hamper the flow. Not that a decrease would be a problem for this pump...
Great case and a really cool mod, shows real quality and the design is great as well as the starting case is a good one to, you can really to a lot with those large and large "cube" cases...
Update: I am still working on getting some good pictures of the box. I have had some issues that needed to be addressed, like heat, I originally figured that the air flow woudl negate any heat flowing from the radiator into teh case based on some previous watercooled systems, unfortunately on this one, I was wrong. I was not sure if I was having a heat ssue or a short due to the plexi behind the mobo. I spent most of teh weekend trying to fix issues it was having. In the end it turned out my ram was overheating. Reversing the mobo side airflow to flow rear to front corrected the issue. I may or may not change the other side to match as it does not seem to be a problem. I also installed the correct mobo standoffs as the ones in it were 1/2mm too short and were causing issues with the PCIe to vid card connection. The good news was that it was not an extreme hassle to do all of this. Something I tried to plan for during the build. I will try and get some better pictures soon now that things are running like they should. Temps; idle is about 6deg. C over room temp, at 100% load it risies to 10degrees over room temp and returns in less than 30 seconds.
Thanks, Once I got started I thought about going with white lights, but I already had too much invested in blue (6 ccfls). I agree, blue is overdone, but with the blue outside and black inside it sort of limits the light color choices. I did try to give it a somewhat fresh take though. I still may switch it to white eventually, but usually the only lights on are the ones on the front anyhow. At least I did not paint the outside black.
Ok, so I melted (yes, melted) the pump the other day. If it is not one thing, it is another. I suspect it was not up to the temp, and the heat it itself produces. It was probably designed to cool itself with cooler water running through it, as most fish tanks run at lower temps. One thing really gets me though, why the heck did a Thermaltake Big Typhoon actually lower my temps?! Any ideas? Too large of pump putting too much heat into the system maybe? Sad when a cooler that is worth less than the pump you burned up cools better than an entire system worth several times it.
I love the color of the case and it looks quite awesome. I suspect you're correct about the pump dumping heat into the loop as most fishtank pumps tend to do that.
You really turned that ugly piece of beige into something you need to look at twice. The ekstra room in the mobo room actually works really well. I like it!