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Modding Xaser III

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Geez, that's a lot of posts... congrats clocker2 :clap: . BTW, don't you normally have white stars by the time you get 1000 posts? or is it 4000?

Did you cut the mobo wall hole larger yet? Nice results..Chilly

No, not yet... I'm saving up for when I have an entire day free so I can do all of my mods at once. So far this is what I have stacked up.

1) Enlarge the mobo holes, add a few more for better wire cleanup.

2) Cut a 120mm hole in my window for the Delta, using my dad's router for it.

3) Put the hard drive on the case wall and remove the last drive cage.

4) Cut out the grills on the front of my case to get better airflow.

That's why I'm holding off... I haven't had a day off in quite a while. Sunday I'm off, but I'm going target shooting with my dad... he just got a new .22 pistol for Father's Day. We're a big fan of .22 pistols... cheap ammo... lots of fun to shoot lots of ammo :) what more can you ask for?
 
mtb856, You have one on your HS too, dont you? Mines the same fan, I think...It's comparative to my Panaflo 92mm U1A....It gets a :thup:...:burn: See sig of rig below:cool:
 
archilochus said:
mtb856, You have one on your HS too, dont you?

yeah, but it's always good to have a second opinion... helps to reassure me when I'm recommending the fan to a newbie. If it's comp. to the U1A, can I recommend that one as well? How did you like it?

That's great that the HHE is working for you :D :burn:
 
If it's comp. to the U1A, can I recommend that one as well? How did you like it?
I think the Panaflo 92mm U1A is a great fan, but there hard to come by..The only place that has them right now is in Canada..:( It has no rpm sensing capabilities, or a connector on the end of its wires..Unless you get a tail..Or a male 3 pin connector(.50cents) to install. What I'm saying is the 2 fans are twins..:cool: I cant tell the diff. between the Panaflo or Delta as far as noise or cooling performance...The Panaflo is cheaper in price, if you can find them.:burn: Temps are the same as with the Panaflo too.

This case looks like the chieftec/antec with a bodykit lol

We'll take that as a compliment..Thank You..:D
 
Zach (enduro) said that I should put the rims with the spinning plates on my case and then I would fit in on the Fast and the Furious :D. My case resembles a lot of the modded Suburbans that you see around here. (please note that I wasn't going for the chromed out pimp look, it just turned out that way :) )
 
Yeppers, its fun to dress up these cases a bit..Just like doing it to a car or truck..Except its harder to wreck your case...No oil changes either.:burn:
 
DOHCrazy said:
Has anyone been able to get the 6HDD bays out of the bottom? im about to start hack sawin.

I did this yesterday. I used a drill with the right sized drill bit and drilled the center of the rivest out that held both drivecages inside the case. Granted I will not be able to use those anymore but now I have free flowing intake of air on that part of the case.

Interesting to note that I havent done any of the snipping to the fan grills or the side panel and I have seen people discuss air actually being blown back which I myself have experienced but didnt think nothing of it. Looks like Im going to have to go to CompUSA and get a nice 120mm fan so I can stick it on the top of this case and then wire snipp all the fan grills. The side door will be a toughy.
 
Since Sprocket has moved into her new Gateway case, and especially since I have returned to watercooling, the loudest ( and most irritating) noise escaping from the case has been the whine of the harddrive.
Had I been a smart person I would have bought a Seagate last year and this may not have been a problem, but nooooo, I was seduced by rebates and bought a WD.
Works fine, but noisier than I would like.

I have been pondering a method to decouple the drive from it's mounting frame, hopefully reducing this noise, and came up with several methods...all increasingly complex.

Last night a new, far simpler method occured to me and this morning I assembled the prototype/proof of concept.
HDD2.jpg

HDD1.jpg

Using four rubber isolating feet, four nylon wire clamps and two rods, the drive should be totally isolated from the main case structure.
The drive is laying on it's back for the photos, it's installed position is 180 degrees rotated, standing on the feet, not suspended.

I used the rather large diameter rods (5/8") simply because they were around, smaller would probably work just as well.
To mount this, all I need is two holes in the front casewall, could hardly be simpler.

I shall install the unit at the same time I redo my waterloop ( adding the northbridge waterblock), probably later this afternoon, and shall post pics of the complete setup and results.

Just thought I'd offer this as proof that the proverbial cat can be skinned several ways....
 
Welcome to Clocker's Saturday Afternoon Modding Party!

Today's main attractions are....
Addition of the northbridge to the waterloop...
mini-waterblock.jpg

And...
The new HDD cradle/mount...
mini-HDDcradle.jpg

Purchasing the Zalman waterblock a few months ago left the stock TT block as surplus and I have often thought it would make a fine block for the northbridge.
Today I made it so.
Pretty straightforward mounting arrangement, just large fender washers acting as clamps at either end did the trick.
Too soon to tell what effect, if any, this will have on performance or temps, but I did lose the northbridge cooling fan in the conversion and that has to be good ( noisewise, at least).
The HDD cradle works better than I'd hoped...the disk whine has been totally eliminated and the seek noise diminished.
You'll notice that I rearranged the implementation a bit...it's all the same parts just laid out differently.
When I mounted the drive with my original design there were some items on the front panel that were in the way ( activity LEDs, mainly), so a little tweaking and I came up with this workaround. It's actually better from a support standpoint I think.
No change to the HDD temp despite the loss of the fan from my original mount.
I'm thinking of a good way to get some air flowing over the top of the drive...that may be more difficult than it's worth.
Again, a few days to gather some data will tell me what I have to do.

Thanks for coming, see you again soon.
 
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Boy... it's awfully quiet in here lately...everyone else must have a life....
Time for some preliminary results/conclusions/questions.

Here are some temps from a 3 hour session last night.
Sprocket had been running stable so I ran some benchmarks to confirm the hardware/software config.
She passes Memtest and Prime, no problemo.
As I had also changed the vidcard cooling while I had her apart ( removed the Zalman Heatpipe cooler and installed the Zalman northbridge HS on the VPU) I also ran Aquamark3 a few times. I can't seem to break 33,000, but the temps were fine ( still doesn't breach 32c running the test) and I think I just need to research my settings and tweak it to go higher. Not that I care about the video that much....
So we Folded for a while...
Folding.jpg

As you can see, the CPU temp didn't break over 40c which is a perfectly acceptable result.
I think that the large reservoir that the pump now sits in really does a fine job of stabilizing the temps- there is only a 2 degree variance over the 3 hour period.
I suppose that my next step would be to increase the radiator efficiency, but that would entail a pump change also and I'm not up for that quite yet.

Last week I had also performed my motherboard wall fan mod and I'm very ambivalent about the results.
I cannot tell exactly how well it really cools the socket/CPU as I believe that I am spoofing the onboard sensors.
I have 6 hardware temp sensors and have been moving them around just to see what's what.
Two of them are just dangling in the case to give me interior ambient temps.
They consistently read 5-10c higher than the "case temp" reported in MBM5.
Wherever that board sensor is located, the fan is obviously skewing it's function...unplugging the fan causes the reported temp to rise to within a degree or so of my hardware reading. CPU temp also rises, although not as drastically (2-3c).

So, it's obvious that the fan artificially lowers the MBM5 reports...the question is does it actually perform any useful cooling function also?
Until I can figure out how to access the on-chip diode ( which I'm beginning to fear is just not possible with the ABIT board) then this question is moot- I have no way to tell.
Sprocket has been running clad in cardboard...I took my own advice and didn't hack up the case skin yet...but I'd kinda like to finalize the layout and run her clothed properly. I'm expecting the sound level to decrease with the full steel enclosure in place and that would be nice. Not that she's loud now, but there is some airwhoosh which should be muffled by the heavier steel skin.

I also have decided that I need to provide some active cooling to the newly-mounted HDD. It is running about 5-7 over my case ambient ( the real, hardware sensor reported temp).
This could be difficult as my space is limited and I've more or less boxed myself into a corner, installation-wise. All of the other considerations are perfect as the HDD is curently mounted ( specifically the cabling/power connectors are all just the way I would like to keep them), it's only the cooling that is awkward.
I'll figure out something...I hope.

Okay, back to your breakfasts.

Edit:
Results from a similar run this morning...the difference is the CPU load, just forum browsing and e-mail...
idle.jpg
 
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Thats a Sweet idea Clocker...

I too fell for the WD scemes, but wish i would have bought a seagate. Sometimes, mine starts to whine, so i go into 'system stanby' to make the hardrive turn off, then come back to windows to restart the spin of the hdd. It sucks to have to do it, but i guess thats what i get.
 
clocker2 said:
Boy... it's awfully quiet in here lately...everyone else must have a life....

Yeah, I've been gone w/ enduro and our church youth group for the last two days... went whitewater rafting and camping in Georgia.

Clocker2, my jaw's starting to become permanently detached from looking at all of the mods that you do. I like modding my stuff, but you make it clean... very nice job. Where did you get those pipes/tubes? They look like they're threaded on the inside... BTW, does that SATA converter actually make an IDE drive faster or is it just to get rid of the ribbon cables?

It's good to be back... I love camping, but I had a withdrawal from being on the forums. It's like leaving your family... :D
 
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