Looking good. http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php/3DMark-2001-SE-build-330-download-320.html Rule of all early 2000's systems I am afraid.
Sound card was painted last night and refitted this morning. Sadly something has made the OS crawl. I don't know whether it is the Avast I installed from '08 or the updates last night (all 140 of them). Either way I can't even get to the control panel add remove programs so it's fried. Got it down pat now though, so will reinstall today.
Sound card done and XP reinstalled. Takes very little time now I have a USB stick with all of the drivers
OK so today's fun began about 30 mins back. The postman came with the LEDs etc. However, one thing that has always boiled my pee is how easily LED strips come unstuck. It's annoyed me since the dawn of the things. 3M my ass. So I decided to add this before even attempting to fit them. Which was an absolute nightmare. If it touches itself you are in big trouble. One of those jobs where you need like ten hands. Eventually I got them in (apols for poor pic quality the weather is crap) Can hardly see them which is what I wanted. Here they are in place, they will never be removed. And on the underside of the box And on. So now I have to get a 240v cable into the PC somehow to power up the PSU. Then I found this little snap out hole. So now just some soldering, braiding, tidying etc and it will be done.
I have watered this down a little in case it upsets the "If you swallow bubblegum it sticks to your insides and kills you !" brigade. So I've not taken any pics of testing, making switches and power cables etc. First remove the bay covers. Then snap out the metal parts. Power supply. You can see the inlet cable here. And then where it will reside. And the inline switch I fitted. So now I can turn the lights off independently of the case etc.
Pretty much slept the whole day. I woke briefly at 3pm, only to eat a bowl of tinned spag bol and then it was back to sleep until 8:30. Been making sure I have had plenty of cold stuff to try and shift it.. Any way, tonight I stuck some sound deadening onto the PC. I quickly realised that due to the placement of the DVD drive that I could not cover the top. So I covered the bottom, took the face plate off of the HD holder and slid it back in, then replaced the face panel on the HD holder (the Akasa thing that now has the alien head badge Lith sent me ) Any way, did that and then put some on the sides of the CD bay and bloody heck, what a difference ! you can hear it spin up but the rattles and vibrations have disappeared. Magic
This needs to be a new modding category. Professional mods are 'nice' but this is where it's at: genuine ingenuity with off the shelf kit.
The only thing I have that's a bit naughty is the plotter lol. Absolutely everything else is all done with a Dremel. The plotter has helped me because I can design in realtime size, which means anything I draw to scale will come out of the other end of it as a perfect template. It just saves me hours of marking out that's all. Mostly because a lot of the time when plexi arrives in small bits like I order the covering is all waffy along the edges so it's hard to mark on. That was why I started doing it. I still have to cut it all by hand though. Some of the parts in this were for a "I love DFI" build from about two years ago or more. I started with a plan, made up a 24 pin and 4 pin etc and even bought a motherboard, but then I got a bum 8 pin splitter that I braided and everything before realising it was an 8 pin EPS splitter and I had used 8 pin neon yellow ends on it I could have stripped it all apart but I just wasn't feeling it. Plus the Corsair 250D was not the most ideal of cases to be working with so I canned it. Amazingly I kept all of the stuff in a box. Usually I have a clearout and chuck it away. Talking of plexi.. The black has arrived. Sadly I'm too sick to use a Dremel. This cold is one of those that makes every muscle in your body feel bad. I did fit the top panel and one of the side panels last night though. Will try and get some pics in a bit
So yeah, last night I sound dampened the DVDROM. I did not want to basically glue the drive in so I did it in strips so that it would still be removable. I repeated the same on the other side, only they were larger because there is no mech there for removing drives. That is why I did not just slap a large piece all the way across (plexi) because I wanted those to work still. I've now fitted the top (which has marks all over it already and needs polishing lol) and the right side panel.
Pushed on and finished the panels. Now I am a sweaty mess and need to go back to bed. It's still not quite finished finished because the black panel will have a chrome decal on with the date it was completed. I still have a few jobs to do before that I did treat myself to a separate chair for this rig because the arms on my chair do not drop (I broke them, now they are fixed in the up position and don't go down).
