Nessmaster

Me and a few friends of mine usually lan out at each other's house. Well one of my friends just happened to have this really neat looking little night stand, that looked like it was out of an IKEA furniture catalogue. I saw potential in it to be made a computer case. The shape is almost a cube (rectangular prism) and is divided into an upper and lower section by a piece of flat wood. There is also a front door for it, which has a small window that is made of a piece of dense plastic (just enough to let the LED glow through, but not enough for a definite shape). Anyway, I got my friend to give me the nightstand thing and I started modding it. I wish I had some before pics of the case but I kinda deleted em by accident before I had a chance to copy them from my camera to computer. But this is pretty much how it looked before the mods (without the fangaurd and screw on the side, and the knob was this ugly silver color, which I later painted black)



Now I had originally made this case so that it would fit my K8 Abit Fatal1ty AN8-SLI board with an x2 3800+. However, after actually finishing the project the mobo kinda crapped out on me in about a week (I can't really blame it, I put that poor thing through alot of stress over the past 3 years matched with my n00bish over clocking). So with the help of Jmke (thanks again) I picked out an E2160 with 2gb of DDR2 6400 Mushkins and a P35 Gigabyte board. However, this meant that after all the modding I had done, I would have to do just a bit more to get the new board to fit. As you can see, the two "ATX" boards have quite a few things that differ, mainly their size.



Which caused me to do some more cutting on the back of the case. It also meant that the two 120mm fans I had mounted in the front, on the sides, would no longer be blowing directly ON the cpu heatsink and the northbridge but kinda just ONTO nothing.



The bottom part of the case contains the mobo along with the components, and the top part contains all the DVD drives and Hard drives along with the PSU and spare cables. I decided to mount the hard drive bay holder (from a Lian Li case I have), dvd drives, psu, and mobo with velcro. That's right, velcro, sue me it works. I have no intentions of the turning the case in any other way than right side up. The piece of wood that separates the top and bottom part of the case has an 80mm fan place in it which sucks air from the bottom back of the case near the GPU to the the top component of the case. Now I guess you could say this is stupid, however that hot air never touches the drives, instead is directly sucked out by the PSU's 120mm fan.



Just to give you an idea of how it looks all together.



Oh yeah, and the voltage controller that needs to be plugged into my PSU in order to run the rails at correct voltage is also mounted on the inside with velcro. The knobs give off a cool blue glow, and is currently the only led lighting within the case.





Now to give a more detailed view of the case mod and the things involved in it. I wanted to keep the thing very quiet and cool at the same time. That's why I chose to upgrade to the 120mm Noctua cpu heatsink. The graphics card also has a passive thermalright heatsink which had to be remounted to face the inside of the card after placing it into the gigabyte board. I also had a very cool, passive, thermalright northbridge heatsink that worked extremely well on the nforce4 chipset on my old Abit. However, it could not be mounted on the gigabyte due to space problems with the Noctua. The 120mm fans at the side are Scythe fans and are mounted with anti vibration dampening pads. They also have high quality fan filters (not that cheap crap that blocks air flow all together). The exhaust 120mm fan is located behind the heatsink at the back of the case and is a 120mm Arctic Cooling exhaust ONLY fan, which comes pre mounted with vibration dampeners. The 80mm coolermaster fan is also mounted with vibration dampeners and is running on 5v using a custom molex cable I made. The hard drives run passive, but I am planning on adding another 80mm coolermaster fan at 5v to move some air around the hard drives. I had some extra vibration dampening/acoustic sound padding left over from a previous build which I decided to integrate into the ceiling of the first floor and near/around the cpu heatsink. The IDE cable is custom bought to fit exactly two IDE drives right on top of eachother (no extra cable), and of course it's rounded. The SATA cables are also custom bought to bend downwards from the hard drives. The Power on/off switch is also a custom switch and is drilled into the bottom of the case allowing the computer to be turned on or off with the use of one's foot.



Some things I plan on changing in the future is hooking up the 120mm exhaust to the 5v molex as well cause right now it is running unnecessarily loud and fast at the current settings and my mobo won't allow me to regulate voltage. I also want to cover the entire inside with some more sound absorbing material.


Here are some old pics I did in the dark of the case with the old mobo and configuration (as you can see some things have been changed since then). The red leds come from built in leds on the Fatal1ty board.

Nessmaster

Overall the case is very quiet and runs very cool. I am also very happy with the new hardware results. It took me about 6 minutes to get to know the settings enough to overclock to 2.4Ghz stable (from 1.8Ghz stock) 8 hours orthos stable. Then it took me about another 6 minutes to get the thing to run at 3.0Ghz at 18 hours orthos stable. Max CPU temp recorded so far was 54C with coretemp at full load running 3.0Ghz. Idles at 31c.






Great mobo, great cpu, and I have to say, great ram (well worth the $150). I wanted to reach 3.4Ghz as many have as well, but I think I am going to stick with 3.0Ghz. I haven't hit a FSB wall yet and I'm sure I could even go past 3.4Ghz with the cooling setup I have, however, I just don't feel the need.

Thanks again to Jmke for the advice on the parts, newegg for cheap parts, UPS for being 5 days late, and performance-pcs for all the small modding crap you never thought you'd need.

jmke

very innovative case good overclock too, what temps do you get at max load?

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Nessmaster

Hehehe

jmke

try Intel TAT for a nice load test
http://www.overclock.net/attachments...el-tat-tat.zip

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Nessmaster

Very interesting. TAT seems to report temp settings of about 10C higher than what core temp reports. Also, when I ran a quick test (5 min) the temperatures also raised as high as 60C on core temp (and naturally 70C on TAT). I will run the utility overnight and see what kinda results I get.

Nessmaster

Did 10 hours of TAT and the temps reached about 61C on coretemp and 72C on TAT. Like I said, I'm not sure which one to believe, I know coretemp to be pretty accurate, but I would also guess Intel's own utility would be as correct as possible as well. But, after 10 hours the computer stayed functional so I would assume everything is stable.

jmke

my T5500 (1.66Ghz) laptop reaches 94°C load temps fyi

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Nessmaster

Yeah but laptop processors can take more heat as well. Thermal Specs show it to be at 100C http://processorfinder.intel.com/det...px?sSpec=SL9SH However, I'm not too worried about the heat at all. IMO the case and heatsink does a fine job of removing the heat from the CPU.

jmke

check your PM

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