Case Mod - In Progress Falcon Northwest Revival

That is the Cooler Master ATC 110; for me and for many people, the most beautiful case that has been made.

I feel it was kind of a crime to paint it; please don't cut it.

 

I don't plan to cut up the case. I don't think it was a crime to paint it. I believe it's even more beautiful. I missed out on that heatsink on eBay. Off to newegg I guess.

 

I sent an email to falcon northwest and they are following the build. I plan on adding that cooler master heat sink this week. Maybe it will be ready for a photoshoot this next weekend.

 

I emailed Falcon Northwest about getting a replacement decal. They don't make them like that anymore and were not interested in giving a new one out. So I sent off an email to them about making my own replacement with my specs and such on it. Fingers crossed that its cool, cuz I think it would make the resto complete...much better than that scraped up mess.

 

I got the okay from Falcon Northwest to make my own decal for the case. I will get to that this week and post a pic of it.

 

Image of the decal I created. I have to scrape off the rest of the old one and print the new decal. Pics of it in the case soon.

 

Here is a pic of my HiPoint Rocket Raid card. Soon it will be running two 1.5 TB in Raid 0. No its not hardware raid, but it was cheap and faster than the onboard sata chip.

 

So instead of buying another 1.5TB hard drive I just Raided two of my 640GB Caviar Black drives. Haven't tested the speeds though. I am considering purchasing an AIO cooling solution. I am thinking of going with the Corsair H80 and running an 80-120mm adapter. Yeah I know, but I want to keep the stock look of the case and besides it should have no trouble cooling my cpu. Any opinions or suggestions on cooling are welcome as I want to upgrade to an OC 8 core AMD cpu.

 

Sleeving sata cables...

 

Got my new Coolermaster Gemini II. Temps really are not that great. At 100% fan speed I am getting temps in the 50C when idle. Temps in my room are 26 C. My Aux according to speed fan went down 50C. Here are the temps
system 50C
cpu 53C
aux 47C
smiovt4-6 51C
HDs 33C

The cpu temps seems too high. The heatsink is correctly set with the supplied thermal paste. Although much quieter the temps are not lower than the stock fan at 3.7ghz with vcore at 1.37.
Any ideas.....? I know the case isn't great for cooling but I was expecting better than this. I don't know the loaded temps yet, I will post those tomorrow.

 

So I have been a bit busy lately. But I did play some games and got a max cpu temp of 62C with all four cores maxed which I am not worried about. The case is now nearly silent and those smaller fans just don't get as much air in/out. If I want to take it back up past 4.0ghz, I will need to invest in an external water cooler. Meh. I will update with some more pics and such soon.

 

Nostalgia hits me when I look at this, I see you are considering watercooling, and in my opionion adding a 240mm rad on top, moving the optical drive down, and "hiding" it behind a nice machined aluminium grill would really just add to it, without ruining the look of it, but thats only my own view, keep it up atleast, yellow is awesome

 

Actually I was considering the old school hanging a rad off the back kit. I don't want to cut the case even to enlarge the fan holes. A Zalman resorator would be cool too though if I can find one.

 

Time to cut the case!

So with the heatsink so close to the case door I am debating cutting an intake on the side. I would use an old school wire case fan grill as they would have used. This would cool down my toasty overclocked 965be. What do you all think?

 

No takers yet eh? I am itching to cut this thing. Someone tell me not to do it!

 

Okay, I cut the hole. No pics til I get the trim on it though. I used a dremel and file so its clean but not perfect. Temps went down considerably. Idle is now around 40-42C. Gaming takes it up to 54C which is around 6-8C cooler. Not too bad. Back up to 4ghz.

 

Falcon Northwest decal

As I said before, they would not send me a new decal, but I did make my own, which they okay'd. I also installed another 3TB hard disk and MSI HD7850. Here is a pic of the logo. More pics to come later this week. http://i143.photobucket.com/albums/r138/maestro0428/IMG_0640.jpg

 

Here is the new fan hole. Its 120mm directly over the cpu fan which is close to the case side panel. Although I didn't want to cut the case, it just doesn't have good cooling unless the little fans are a blowin.