4472 Deluxe - personal rig worklog - updated

Grez

If you want a modular PSU, look no further than that Magnum I put in my Q500. Since you're looking to quiet your case, it will definitely do the trick -- it's a silent PSU. 500W, dual 12V rails, silent, modular, good looking, and stable. ~$110. That's a good deal. How's that for not having to contend with the PSU fan?

As for my air cooling, my case is surprisingly quiet, despite all of those fans. By using my fan controller, I'm able to leave most of them on a fairly low setting, which makes them all but undetectable, but with the number that I have, there is still plenty of air moving through that big ol' case despite running the fans at lower RPMs. I bought fans with a high CFM-to-noise ratio anyway, so I knew none of them would get too annoying.

That's awesome that you have a shop you can leverage...for me, it's just whatever hand tools I own, and my shop is whatever space I can clear up on one side of my garage.

Reven1911

Where did you find the Magnum for 110? The cheapest I can seem to find it is 140 + shipping and 150 locally. I'd be willing to pay the 150 for it after looking into it, it's just damn sweet but if I can get it for 110 all the better.

Got my side panel back today. My coworker did a good job on the cutting. I have to file the rough edges down a bit and I still need to get my actual window material but I already can see that it's gonna be pretty sweet looking. That magnum will look wicked. I definately have to replace the PSU before I do anything else. The cheap piece o junk I got in there now looks heinous.

Wire management isn't to shabby. PSU cables are a little rough (not sleeving since I'm changing it out) but other than that it looks good. Can't hide everything perfect but it's working so far, very tidy for no modular and not sleeving.

Grez

$104 - http://www.memoryman.biz/product_inf...214&ad=froogle
$120 - http://www.cybersprinter.com/item_de...sp?prodid=1478
$109 (but out of stock) - http://www.excaliberpc.com/MGE_XG_MG...id-560285.html
$125 - http://www.amamax.com/mgexgmaps50a.html

Annnnnnddddd the Wiiiinnnnneeerrrrr!!!! http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=PS-MAG500
$101.97!!! This is where I bought mine ($95 a couple of months back, if you can believe it), and I had no problems. I've ordered from eWiz.com about two or three times with no issues. I'd give 'em a try.

You and I will be the only two people on the entire planet with an Inwin Q500 case and a Magnum 500W PSU! A rare case and a rare PSU FTW!

DISPOTIC1

Top notch work Grez.Love the color scheme.Also I was getting ready to order the Magnum psu from another site for $120,and I noticed your post on some better prices.Thanks man.I will be ordering it on Monday.I will let you know how it works out.By the way selling A ultra x connect cheap .Man was i wrong on that one.lol

Grez

Hey, don't feel bad...you're not the first one around here to make that mistake. People buy it 'cause it looks cool, and then when their system starts acting weird, they're like WTF? Do I have a bad video card? Did my mobo die? And then it turns out it's that blasted Ultra. Those things are seriously misnamed! LOL

You'll love the Magnum...it looks cool, is incredibly stable, and completely silent while delivering high-end PSU power. Awesome.

DISPOTIC1

Well wont be making that mistake again,research ,research,research.Thanks again Grez.

imput1234

That looks awesome man! good job

myownenemy

You're my hero. dang that's clean.

myownenemy

By the way, since you're going for a car look...
http://xoxide.com/xray1.html
haha...

Grez

Heh heh...I just bought one of these...it's on its way to my house right now. It's getting modded, and then installed into the bottom bay in this case.

Great minds, brother. Great minds.

Grez

Well, this is a very small update, as I haven't had the time (or in some cases, the parts) to work on my rig much lately. Plus, I had to play HL2 all the way through again with my 7800GT just to appreciate my newer graphical capabilities. Damn, that game is fun. But, I digress...

Anyway, I made a couple of small part mods that are not installed yet, but which the detail-oriented people will appreciate. We're back to the crappy cameraphone pictures, so a thousand apologies for the horrible quality of these photos. I should be getting my repaired Canon back in just a few days, and then I'll get better shots then.

So anyway, part one is modding my Creative Labs LiveDrive data cable. You can see in previous pics that this is the ugly, flat, gray ribbon cable that helps mess up my wire management. I've always wanted to mod it (to turn it into a round cable), but was a chicken because it's a proprietary cable and generally irreplaceable. But, this thing is now about two or three years old and way out of warranty anyway, so I figured what the hell, let's go for it.

So here's what we started with, and the basic stuff that's being used to modify it:


Oops! Almost forgot I was going to need some tie-wraps too! And some cutters:

You can see that I've started cutting the cable here as well...first cut made, too late to go back!

And here is the cable completely stripped apart:

I made separation cuts every two wires, which leaves things a bit more sturdy than going every one, plus this cuts your work in half! This is good, because doing this requires a lot of patience and about 20-30 minutes of time. You can also see a couple of electrical tape patches where I got a little crooked on my very last cut and had some exposed copper. Can't have that! So I used the electrical tape to insulate those two little spots...problem solved.

And now, it gets tie-wrapped neatly so that I can start shoving it into the wire loom:

I cut most of these tie-wraps off (except for the ends) as it went into the loom. This left the final cable more flexible and kept it from having funny lumps in it where the tie wraps were located. But, having them there in the first place kept things neat and lined-up until it could be stuffed into the loom.

Add some blue electrical tape wrap on the ends of the bare gray wires, and voila! We now have a round cable in chromed blue looming that matches the rest of my case interior:


And that, my friends, is how to get from the nasty, flat ribbon cable (emulated below here again using an IDE cable) to a pretty, custom round cable:


The next thing I worked on was painting switches for the front of my case. As I mentioned earlier in the log, I'd like to be able to control my lights from the front of the case instead of having to crawl under my desk to hit switches in back. Plus, this is going to eventually help out with the wire management in this case too. I have an amber switch to control the yellow lighting, and a blue switch to control the blue lighting. The only problem was that the automotive switches I chose only come molded in black, and I wanted them to be chrome to match the trim on the front of the case.

So, I went to Home Depot and bought some Rustoleum chrome paint. Next, I carefully used the green automotive masking tape to completely cover the colored plastic switches:

We're ready to paint!

I took some in-progress pics here of priming and painting, but on my crappy cameraphone, the pictures are so bad that you can't even tell what's going on in them. So, just close your eyes or something and meditate, pretending that you see pretty pictures of my step-by-step paint process.

And, our finished product:

Two chrome-trimmed backlit automotive switches! Now, all I have to do is make them work!

By the next update, I hope to have my camera back...more to come then...

xtremegamer_624

I'm a bit late on this...but that looks amazing Grez. I'm digging the paint job and the yellow came out really good, I've seen some yellows come out either too light or almost green but that looks solid yellow to me. Also loving the two tone scheme, best way to paint IMO. Even two toned floppy...that's nice right there

Top notch work Grez, I also like the fan placement on the front and the mesh like grating covering them up.

Just saw your last post, man that is good work with some custom round IDE cables. I've never seen that done before...very creative, and the outcome looks flawless.

R.Carter

Details are where it is at. Separates the men from the boys.

Nice cable work. I migh tdo something like that with my new X-Fi when I finally get around to finishing my new rig.

Thanks!

RedRoseWolF

Excellent work on that ribbon cable, might just be the camera phone, but I would have thought that was heatshrink had you not said it was electrical tape...

Grez

Hey, thanks! Yes, I'm happy with how the cable turned out. I can't claim to have thought this idea up all by myself...I've seen other modders do something similar, although usually with standard sleeving and without capping the ends. The examples I saw before were also with dime-a-dozen standard EIDE cables, whereas I was modifying something proprietary, so it took a little while to get my courage up. I'm glad I pulled the trigger, though. The result is great and (as far as I can tell) I didn't screw anything up.

Well, as old as I feel sometimes these days, that alone should be enough to separate me from the boys.

Ah, that's right, you're getting the fancy-schmancy X-Fi. Man, that thing is sweet. Let me know how you like it, and I'll look forward to seeing what you do with the same big ugly gray cable.

Nope, it's definitely electrical tape. I keep colored stuff around for exactly this sort of reason. It's also good for hiding fan cables against painted backgrounds. I would have liked to have used heat shrink, but there isn't anything that will band properly around the large top part of the cable. So, electrical tape was my best option...the cameraphone actually hides a couple of the flaws in my wrap job, but it still looks good in my opinion, and definitely looks better that having bare gray wires sticking out of the pretty chrome blue looming. Thanks for the props.

Grez

Dang, it's been so long since I worked on this project, I hardly know where to begin. First of all, I can gripe about my camera again...Canon serviced it, but didn't fix the main problem, and so we have to send it back in again. It wasn't working at all, but then later tonight it decided to work sporadically. So, some of the pictures will look decent, and others won't because they were taken with the POS camera phone. In any case, Canon is going to take the camera and try to fix it properly this time, so I should have a fully functional camera back in a couple more weeks.

So, I've only done a few more things, and they're mostly detail things, but they've turned out fairly well and are making a big difference already. The first thing is that I took someone's suggestion and decided to color the ugly gray ends of my rear USB extensions to make them match my looming and overall color scheme. So, I found a dark blue Sharpie, and set up shop.

The basic tools and parts, the "before" shot:


Color, color, color, color, color (this took much longer than I original thought it would), and this is what you get:

Not perfect, and a little more purple shaded than I really wanted (because of the blue going over the gray), but it beat the pants off of that ugly gray that didn't match.

Some close-ups:


Again, this is a careful job with blue electrical tape, not heat shrink. The heat shrink won't cover this wide and narrow of areas all at once, so the electrical tape is the best bet, and it actually looks pretty dang good.

And here it is in the case (a big improvement):

This pic also reminds me how eager I am to get my front light switches done so I can get rid of those ugly switch wires in the back.

So, the next thing I finished was the stealth the optical drives. I don't have time for a full tutorial here (perhaps I'll do a dedicated post on that some time), but here is a condensed step-by-step...

First, this is what the original bay covers look like from the back:


And after slicing off the side clips, sanding down the little plastic vanity pieces on the sides, cutting out about 2/3 of the criss-cross reinforcements on the inside to make it smooth, and carefully using a rotary tool sander to take three of the four "walls" down to half their original width, you end up with this:

(I guess there is also the matter of attaching Velcro and making a raised, hardened spot that will push on the eject button behind the panel.)

Next, you mount the cover on the drive with the original faceplate removed and Velcro attached to the bare tray:


And magic! You have two optical drives that look like stock bays, but are fully functional. This looks a lot better than those beige drives now, doesn't it?


Push the bottom right-hand corner, and the tray ejects like normal:


And both open at once (to prove it works without the drives conflicting):

I hadn't noticed it before, but it looks like the trays on my DVD ROM and DVD burner are actually slightly different lengths. Fortunately, I have about 1/2 a millimeter of clearance that keeps them from rubbing and interferring with one another when they close.

My yellow cathode hidden in the front bezel is a bright sucker. And I mean really bright (thank you, Logisys). Overall, it gives me the effect I want by glowing out of the hard drive cooler and the bottom vent holes, but it's so intense that it overpowers the power/HDD activity lights and glows like mad right through the bottom orange LED intake fan, making all of that yellow as well, which is something I don't want. So, I worked on a way to isolate the light to where I want to keep it.

Here are the basic materials I used:

As it turned out, I ended up not using the hot glue, and instead using green automotive tape (to help cover up some final gaps). The metal piece is from a can of peanuts (carefully cleaned)...perfect for easy cutting with tin snips. The red plastic is the lid.

Here is my custom metal cover with a slit in it to slide it around the wires, and a proper hole in the top to leave a place for the wires to stick out:


And here it is after the first mounting:

Later, I ended up lining the edges along the bottom with green tape, as the light was so bright that some was still reflecting into the chamber, even with the tiny little gap there.

And here I've cut some of the red plastic to arch around the bottom intake to help diffuse the yellow light coming through the orange LED fan:


Here is a full shot with the cathodes off:


And here's one with them on:

The scheme worked overall (you can see that unholy light coming out of the HDD cooler, but not so much from the power LED, etc. any more). The main power LED actually has its original green color (it will be re-soldered with a blue one later, if all goes well), but the HDD activity lights are still a little funky. You can see the amber lights flash, but there is a green hue to them all of the time. That's because the tape is still somewhat opaque, and the intense yellow light still comes through a bit, but is colored green by the tape. This will be fixed when I go to put the blue power LED in there, as I will then remove the green automotive tape and replace it with black electrical tape, which should solve the problem. But I'm glad to know that in the end, my little plan seems like it will work.

Just for grins, here's a shot of the Sunbeam Chromatic Windmill up close:

As mentioned before, it's been customized to yellow, but I chose it because it already had a blue-background LED panel and blue backlit controls. You can see that fan #4 is missing...this will be the 120mm side intake that doesn't exist quite yet...I'm waiting for it to arrive in the mail.

And also just for fun, here's a shot showing that my Thermaltake X-Ray has arrived from Xox:

Yeah! I love this thing. Now, all I have to do is mod it as well (let's break the warranty before we even try it out!) and then switch some stuff around in the bays. I need to move the LiveDrive, as the knobs on it will conflict with the X-Ray's drink holder if the X-Ray is on the bottom. So, the LiveDrive unit will go on the bottom, and the X-Ray will be installed in the fourth position. That solves that problem...now all I have to do is figure out what to do with all of the wires that are currently stuffed in the empty bay! But I have a plan for that too...more to come later...

Next...a blue power LED...an actual badge for the case badge light I installed...X-Ray customization...automotive light switch tests...and (hopefully) mounting the new light switches in the front panel...stay tuned...

DJ-Nokey

looking really really good dude.. i like :)

xtremegamer_624

Very impressive work, I like the idea behind the USB ports, simple but creative. Coming along nicely, looking forward to see more.

R.Carter

Embrace the Sharpie!

Nice use of materials at hand, especially the peanut can. And of course, your attention to detail is inspiring.

Don't forget, warrenties are for lesser modders.

RedRoseWolF

Looks awesome so far but of course my internet has been really crappy today so I couldn't see half the pics, but it's awesome how things around the house can help so much...