H.I.M.E. An ongoing Contruction

[Introduction]

I built some pc's for my sisters a few months back. They were meant to be reliable box's that could run for a long time without service. I experimented with them, using a new motherboard from msi, the rs480im and a foxconn micro atx case that was on sale.

We replaced the psu's, since the stock foxconn psu's were less than quiet.
The cases however, I liked. They came with a neat little rail system and lots of fan mounts and were just generally quite pleasant to deal with compared to a lot of full atx cases i deal with at work.

So in the last few months, i basicly made up my mind that i wanted one of them. I wanted a pc that was compact and quiet, since it would be in the bedroom after we moved. I wanted it to be everything my previous pc was but smaller and trouble free.

Some have seen my lanboy. it is somewhat... not trouble free. Modifying it to watercooling took a lot of its support out to make room for a decent rad.
With a full atx midtower, i was limited to having only two hard drives and a DVD rom.

What i am going to do is modify a cheap, available foxconn micro atx case into a powerful media pc. This pc has to be quiet and capable of storing upwards of a TB of stuff in a small space.

I hope my efforts to create this pc are of interest to some. =)

[The case: Foxconn TW-1]





Case is made of light steel. Comes with 2 usb ports on the front and audio in/out. 2x 5 1/4" drive bays, 2x 3 1/2" drive bays. Only a single railed hard drive bay.
Neat peculiarities for this case are its spring loaded drive retention mechanism *the black thing on the drive cage* also, it comes with a rear 92 mm fan and a front 80 mm fan. These were included and foxconn branded. The rear fanmount can accept 80 and 92 mm fans where the front is limited to a 80 mm fan. there is however room for a 120mm fan with modification since the case only has provision for one hard drive.
The usb and audio cables are detachable, so any you dont use can be saved for a later date when you might use them. the case side has lots of ventilation for the pci cards and a duct for cpu coolers.

I decided to name this pc after my main use of the pc, Anime watching. Anyone who has seen Mai Hime might understand the reference ^^

[Parts list]

I will be using some of the parts from my old pc as well as a number of new ones to put this box together.
Among the parts being rescued; My cpu. Ill be using my winchester cpu for a while untill i can afford a denmark. My corsair memory. This is actully promised to a friend as i wanted to update to a 2gb kit. This is somthing in the works, but for now, 1 gb of ram is all i have.
My hard drives are all going to migrate to this beast as well, but ill be replacing my pata drives with sata ones this year. I will use a enclosure for my 200 gb in the mean time.

Among the new parts are a new psu to replace my aging powerstream. Some may remember my modded ocz since i cut off a lot of cables and made my own quick connects. I liked them, but this machine has to be compact and clean. it also needs to... work completly. Without a atx 24 pin, pci express 6 pin and limited to only 4 molex connectors, I replaced it.





My friend got this psu to replace his dead Antec and has had nothing but good things to say about it. It keepts his overclocked SD3700 happy with very stable rails and its quiet as can be. a steal at $50 cdn.

By going with a micro atx case, of course i needed a suitable motherboard. The geforce 6150 is currently the best offering in this field, and a lot of the 6150 boards are capable overclockers.
The foxconn 6150 board has the best overclock functions, but this msi board was regarded as being nearly problem free. The asus board is nearly identical, but has glaring issues with the onboard DVI. I need the freedom to use the onboard graphics for quadhead sometime down the road when i can get another monitor or two ^^.

I decided on the MSI K8NGM2-FID. This incudes the 6150/nf430 combo with 8usb 2.0, nvraid with 4 sata 2 channels, nvlan and firewire. It also has a Onboard DVI-D which can be used by itself, or with the dsub as well. the onboard graphics supports dual head, making it one of the only integrated graphics boards that does. Unlike the rs480.




Clear cmos switch and easy to access battery removal everything is colorcoded, typical of msi boards.


cheap backplate, but its a cheap board.


Onboard VGA and DVI-D

The board also came with all the usual stuff. but also: hdtv and svideo tv out brackets and 8 channel audio outputs. If you put all the brackets in, you would use up all your pci slots =O!

[The Psu Mod]

I figured i would start this project with the easiest "although one of the more time consuming" projects, the psu sleeving.
Since the case is small, i wanted to make the cableing as clean as possible. The case has only one opening side, since the back side and the top are one peice, rivited to the main chassis.
So my plans to stuff all the unused wires on the backside of the tray are pretty much sunk, unless i remove all the rivets "there are 34 in total" to take a good 90% of the case appart.

I might cross this bridge at a later date. I am toying with the idea of painting on the backside of my case, which i will remove it for. but for now, i sleeved the powersupply for daily use while i make up my mind.

For those who are looking to do their first psu sleeving job, consider this primer.

I used a paperclip to work on the molex leads. I always suggest doing these first since they are easy and give you a good feel for the process of insert, twist, remove.
For those who havent done this mod before, you simply insert this in the space between the pin and the plastic connector. There are two small tabs you have to bend down to remove the pin from the connector.

If you look at the pin, there is a slit in it. if you look at it as if the slit is the North facing side, you will find the tabs on the east and west side. simply stick the paperclip between the pin and the plastic and bend them in. the pin should slip out from the connector easily enough if done right.
Be careful not to apply too much pressure because you dont want to crush the pin






Here is a view of what the pins look like removed from the connector. it also shows what the tabs look like. when you remove the pin, they will be depressed. when you go to insert them again, you want to bend them outward slightly so the pin locks when reinserted. I did this by using my xacto knife edge and sticking it in the small slit space and levered the tab outward with a little pressure.
These are soft, it doesnt take a lot of pressure at all.

What is really important here is to lable these wires cleanly and carefully, A trick i have learned though by doing this a few times is to simply associate the numbers on the connector.
If you look at it, you will see some numbers on it, and those numbers represent the wire color or voltage wire.
Yellow is +12v and nubmer 1, the first black next to that is -12v and is number 2. beside that is -5v or number 3 and finally, red is nubmer 4 or +5 volt.

You can lable these anyway thats convenient for you. at first i labeled them 1-4, but the more you do, you get used to the fact that yellow is always 1 and red is always 4. I label only one of the black ones. usually number 2, or -12 v.

another way to keep track is to tape the yellow and its adjacent black together, and the red and its adjacent black together to make two leads. 12v and 5v.

it doesnt matter how, as long as 1-4 go back into their correct holes.

the atx pins are a little trickier to remove since they are square. there is also a lot more of them to remove.
On a typical psu, you have a atx 20/24 connector, p4 12 volt connector with 4 pins and a pci express 6 pin connector.

You will want to label these 1-24 1-4 1-6 according to the order in which you remove them. Most of these also dont have the same wire color as another psu, so you will have to identify a pin #1 on the connector. I usually do this with a jiffy marker triangle heh.




The square pins are exactly the same as the round ones. they have 2 tabs on two sides that need to be depressed to be removed from the connector.
I used two pins. make sure you insert them all the way into the connector sides to depress the tabs. this will be difficult on psu's with opaque connector colors.
when you cant push these pins in any further, find some way to keep the pressure on these pins " i held them in there by pushing the connector against a arm of my couch, where i did this mod heh" and pull the wire out.

There are tools to remove both of these types of pins, but they are expensive. I wasnt willing to pay $29 for a one use tool that is just a peice of metal you jam in and twist.
Make sure you label these pins very clearly. inserting the wrong pin into the wrong place probably wouldnt be very friendly to your motherboard.




what you will end up with




I like to use the smallest sleeving possible. im using 3/4" for the atx though since it is good to have a little big of give. The sleeving expands when you compress it end to end,a nd this is how you will get it over your pins and down over your wires. I taped all my pins together to do this so the resistance was as little as possible. It also allowed me to use smaller heatsink which looks best imo.






what clean heatshink looks like. You can make out some of the sleeving pattern in the heatshrink.

I always suggest using a heatgun. its kind of expensive for the firsttimer, but a worthwhile investment. You can also use a lighter, or if your really strapped, the heating element on your stove. just be careful not to let the flame get too close to the sleeving. it will melt and leave burn holes.

you should keep a lighter around though. a cheap bic one beacuse you want to melt the ends of the sleeving after you cut it. If you dont, the weaves from the sleeving wont stick to eachother and will be able to get caught and unwind.
even after heatshrinking, a weave can get caught on a peice of electronics and be pulled out of the heatshrink. if you melt the ends, you minimize the chance of this.

when all is said and done, you end up with this




much better.

A hint for what comes next

nice dude, keep the pics comin

nice sleeving, i did the same on my seasonic s-12 600w and it took me 10 hours and a couple of cuts

Nice job.
Those are BIP micros right?

I bought that same case for my sister, its a great little case for the price. Looking great so far, keep it up!

Im not sure how ill go about the watercooling though. Im still trying to figure out if i can use a front mounted heatercore, but if i do that, then i have nowhere to put the pump. There are times that i wish i still had my csystem =\
also, i tested a water run in this case using only one of the rads and wasnt too impressed
my copper 1u sink seems to outperform that. Hopefully the two of them will be suitable heh but i have to figure out some more airflow specifics since i put acustic foam on the side panel. so the holes are covered.Im getting tempted to just leave this thing air cooled for now.

Nice!! I love ur sleeving job!

Awsome sleeving. Much better than mine was when I first attempted it.

And, I swear to God, before I even entered this thread the first thought in my mind was "another anime fan?"

Thanks for the comments guys. I took my time on this sleeving and im quite happy with it. i only wish i had sleeved some more worthy fans heh. i got it all tucked away nice and neat too, which ill take a picture of later when i have a little more time to think about it.

Liquid cooling is my main focus and i have to make up my mind on hot much modding i want to do. My desire to have more internal hard drives is slowly waning as im not using much of my 250 gb right now.
I have a 120 and 250 in there right now, and im not running raid. so if i were to only use one drive i could fit a pretty good size heatercore in there.



These are the rads i have to choose from. i have 2 of the swiftech ones. the nicer looking one is in a test loop that failed my test for single rad performence heh.
I dont think that even two of them will match even that chevette core for single fan performence. The largest rad there was of course the most ideal, i only used 1 fan on it and got 33ºC full load with my gpu in the loop too.

for size reference, the chevette core will fit without modification. it will just have to be shoved in tightly. the biggest rad on the right would fit if i remove the bottom two cages of the case. i would however have to get rid of the locking mechanism, which may or may not work well. the two switech rads would fit in the back, with a modded backside, but that goes against everything i have learned about watercooling.
I dont want to use hot case air. might as well just get a tower heatsink if i did that.

ill take a picture of the acustic foam later ^^.

The single core is your best bet IMO.

yea, go with the single chevette core. it is really not worth it to put in the two swiftech rads

flamerail said:

Nice!! I love ur sleeving job!

Click to expand...

QFE!!! One of the best I have seen very nicely done right down to the heatshrink.

he he. my trusty chevette core has seen a lot of action since i started using it in like... 2004... maybe ill jack the barbs off the one beside it and clean it up a bit. maybe give it a painjob he he.

Ill have to take my rig appart tonight and test fit it though. The problem with using a front rad at all is there is front usb and the power switch bracket. they are detachable peices, but still get in the way a bit.

and thank you SO much for your comments on the sleeving. This is the first one I have done where i tried to remove all the atx connectors as well to do the mod. I have to say, the charcol color is quite nice. simple and matches well with the case.

more pics soon.

Choices choices.....

Very nice. I wish I had the patience to sleve my power connectors. :S

Keep it up, and yeah that 80mm (?) swiftec one is too small for a current system.

kinda random.. but as i remember it..

hime meant princess in japanese. lol.

i wonder what it implies XD

Indeed it does. I watch more Anime these days than actual tv... i mean... there is stargate, BSG and like.. friends... most of our tv just isnt that interesting right now.

I dont know what I wanted to go with that theme this time though. I am thinking of painting a picture of Natsuki Kuga on the side though. I havent drawn in a while and docgigs really inspired me with his bleach theme.