Case Mod - In Progress Gears of war PC

The PC mod that I decided to do after ages of planiing. It is broken into 2 phases as there is simply too much work to be done. Here is the progess so far...



My Antec 1200 fully stripped down

And Just to show you the standard fans that come with it



This is after the 1st coat of paint (I used automotive paint to get the glossy glass finish.) (Its Honda Civic Type R Red)





Modding the side pannel to get the Gears of war Logo on it.



I decided to do all the easy things 1st and get them out of the way.


I modded the standard fans which come with it, and changed them red. Also I shorted the board in the fan to remove the Fan controller from them so I will be able to control them using a fan controller in a central place.




Here Im building (Finished yet) a control panel for all the lights in the system, and to control the peltier based cooling system & chiller which which will be part of phase 2 of the project.




I also decided to mod the power supply (With out voiding the warrenty ) to fit the colour scheme as well.

 

Lookin good. Do you have any plans for the TEC?

 

Hi! First of all I cant comment on the mod itself, since i had to stop the site from loading dou the HUGE pictures

Use a program like photoscape to resize them down to say, 1024 in width That helps you to upload them faster, and us to load them faster

Keep it up

 

Nice start - but PLEASE resize your pictures

 

Oops Soz about that... I thought I pointed it to the correct folder.. but guess i didnt

 

I've gone ahead and done the drive bays. I didnt try to do any crazy thing turn the bay upside down to mount on the Antec 1200 as i have seen others do. I basically causes 2 problems going forwards when your trying to put more drives in. Its just a paint to hold the drive and put the screw in while keeping the bay in the slot.



So did them the right way up. A bit more drilling to do but all worth it in the end.

The bay to the right is going on top of the other bay which you see to the left. So when it is mounted both the opening line up on top of each other.

There will be ofcourse a slot in the case in the middle of both the bays which wont get used.
And the cables will be routed through there on to the side of the via another hole on the right hand wall of the case. That way no cable is ever visible from the outside.

The wholes on the base case were done as follows.

 

I have a few early drawings for the TEC water chiller Im hopeing to build ... It very ruff and need alot of reffinement.

Here they are.. (They are all based on custom built water blocks, which I will be doing out of solid copper blocks.)

 

Yay my pc fan controller arrived. I tested it with a pelt I had with me.
Its just a 40Watt Pelt I had left over from a earlier build. But I used it to test out the Fan controller and just worked fab.



Showing the cold side



and the warm side

 

Nice, I'll help you move along with the TEC stuff.
http://www.overclock.net/peltiers-tec/395259-quad-tec-water-chiller-project-ultrasonic2s.html
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=172946
Very interesting reads and they are filled with others findings and mistakes, great learning material.

 

so you are going to be using 10x90w peltiers?

 

Nope Acutally I was considering initially to use 90 Watt pelts but since then my calculations have shown things to work out slightly better by using 50W Qmax pelts. I will write a post up of the full calculations and thought process I took and publish it as soon as i finalize on what it is going to be.

Thanks for the links.. will read them fully. any pit falls which can be avoided will be good.

In the mean time i've done a few more things which the little time i get off.

Finished the mod on the Top fan.

I did some shorting out on the fan controller board to allow me to control the fan using variable voltage and got rid of the fan controller and light switch that come along with the fan.





Im also testing out some PSU's to mod into the case as a 2nd supply which will help me power the pelts.

I might have to combine 2 or more PSU's or will have to build 1 from scratch to power the pelts all depends on the finalized power requirements.

But here are a few early pics

 

I would make the cold area in the center to reduce condensation, less material to insulate.

 

I actually considered that, but my line of thinking was that the more surface area which comes into contact with water the more temperature it is going to drop by.

Basically thermodynamics states that by using the heat transfer coefficient
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_transfer_coefficient)

Thats why i choose the outer sides.

That being said, like i said before these are just 1st off ideas that im playing around in my head, while i'm actually finishing off the calculations. Once that is done, I will come up with the final design.

thanks for all the input The community here is really great !

 

I Finished braiding all my sata cables and mounting it on the drive bays, it turned out pretty well. I used Braiding and shrink wraps from WCUK. They are of good quality.






I did some work on modding the TOP of the case to fit the 2nd power supply. I decided to go ahead with fitting a 350 Watt Powersupply onto the case which is going to power all the fans, lights, fan controllers and other secondary stuff on the case.

It will give me the ability to fit all the equipment in, with better cable management and wont add load to my primary supply in anyway.

Further the case will functions will be independent from the primary equipment getting put into the system.





Had to cut away a few inches on the top to make space for the 2nd powersupply. So that the supply would sink into the case and sit neatly as a tight fit.

The top of the case plastic had to be cut to make the opening for the top of the power supply this, will be replaced with a custom built cover which I will be doing next.



After all the cutting was done I decided to test the out come and turned out pretty good.

 

I decided to stress test the PSU I built before I actually build it into the case. (Just to be on the safe side).





I ran the whole thing for a total of 8 hours. And loaded it with a pelt, a set of cold cathods, and 2 fans. I did very well. did not get hot at all and was stable through out.



After 5 hours of running it.



After 8 hours of running it.

 

Been a few days since my last update. I managed to do a few things, been busy with some project going live in office, had to work late so couldn't put in more hours.

Here I did a mock up of the top bezel to see how it would turn out. I used just normal card boards to do this.



After which I went ahead and did the cut out on a piece of aluminium sheet, which was left over from a old case. (Side panel).





This is after bending the aluminium into the correct shape.



Then I had to sand the panel down and applied metal filler to even the areas out. Finally I did 3 coats of filler primer on it to get the smooth finish you get on automotives which will go nicely along with the rest of the case. I did have to do wet sanding between each coat of primer and had to leave it for 24 hours before each coat so it did take some time.

Now the only thing left is to apply the matt black finishing paint on it. I will probably do 2 - 3 coats of that as well, to get the finish I want.

Finally I did the clear coats on the front bezel and the side panel with gears of war logo, that all for now folks.

 

I finally got around to do a write up after sometime. But I have done loads of work for the past 2 weeks.
I managed to finish the base of the Case.





Finally got the 2nd PSU fitted into the case







And the power connector for the power supply was fitted into the case at the back.



I decided to change all the stock fans in the case, I originally wanted to use the stock fans with interchanged LEDs tor red, but the air flow they produced was not up to my liking and they were far too noisy at max speed for my liking. So I swapped them out for the Gentle Typhoon 1850 rpm fans. For anyone who doesn't know they are solid fans and push a lot of air and are perfect to use with the Corsair H70 as I was planning to do.







My power supply is a Corsair 850W. It's a really good and solid power supply, as you would expect for a product from Corsair, the only glitch is the cables which are not braided. So I had to pull all the pins out and braid them and put it back again.







Fitting the stuff into the case

















I got custom dust filters for all blow fans to minimize dust flow into the system.

 

thats coming on nicely ive also started a antec 1200 project so keeping an eye on this as it might give me some ideas

 

Built the switch panel. I used a Antec front wire mesh to do it. It's very easy to work with and you can make the holes relatively easy with a good pair of pliers. Used wire clips and plastic wraps which I got from Maplins to keep the wiring neat. I braided the rest of the cable to make it into one think cable than 10 thin wires running about. It fits in with the rest of the build and actually looks pretty neat.









The switches are going to control the

1. DVD ROM tray open
2. Cold cathodes
3. Big boy fan on top the case
4. Manual override to switch on the 2nd power supply
5. 12V rail External connector port power (from 2nd power supply)

 

Damn what detail on the wiring awesome work there