ALXAndy

When it comes to PC parts and cooling nothing is ever big enough.

Well it goes to show what a wonderfully diverse world we live in I like air brushing. I've seen how hard it is and how much work goes into it, plus I'm a fat old fart so I like DB's mods as they have that old skool charm about them

So you don't like it but it's the best because she spent the most money on it? what sort of a mentality is that? Oh sorry, forgot, that's the mentality of the entire modding scene. How stupid of me to forget.

Oh I see. Sorry mate, good old context and the internet again

Good thing I don't care what you think then really. I'm allowed my opinion, same as those lining up to stick their tongue between his cheeks. I don't like it, deal with it.

I really don't like this. It looks tacky, kinda like a Persian apartment. Sorry man but B Negs has got you on this one.

Looks like a D Frame some fat chick sat on.

OK guys, more work done First up the ram coolers arrived today. So I removed the orange coolers with my heat gun. And duly fitted them. They look stunning. I absolutely love these, just as pretty and intimidating as any ram IMO.

Nice. Is that being painted silver?

So tonight I have done more work. Basically nothing much to see, as it's all wiring tidying. I had my torch out (flash light to you sceptic tanks) and was digging through the IO wiring and found a plug that wasn't plugged in. Looked at the label on it and it said "Bluetooth"... Hmm... Followed the wire and sure enough, hidden in the front of the case is a bluetooth module. I've had the case for three years and it's always been disconnected lol. That will come in handy ! So other stuff. Well first up let me remind you that the colour scheme is black, white and red. Most of the stuff will be black and white and the wiring is all black and red braided.. OK so here is the board I will be using (WITHOUT the Apple logos and cooler) it's a Gigabyte X79 UD3. Again, a reminder that it's just the board, no cooler, no apple logos. So in my initial post I said that ram was TBC. Well it turns out I will be using a set of quite expensive ram I bought for DFI but never used. 2333mhz tight timings. Only issue is, well, look at it. It's bloody orange So, what to do.. Well, those of you who know me and have read some of my logs may remember I did a build called N-Fenix. I was tight on funds so I had some crappy unbranded ram, but I brought it to life using these. Yes, it really is as big as it looks. They're absolutely enormous

The postman came with gifts. So here is the 120mm intake I made. And that lovely MNPCtech grill And in it goes with a new 3.5" blank plate. The yellow Patriot convoy looked bad against the white. The HDD bays in the right panel are wired to SATA connectors. Sadly I can't route the SATA connectors the way I want to (they look like poo stock) so I have ordered six of these. Flowers not included obs. These will allow me to run the cables through the holes I want to which will make them much cleaner. I also made up a very long molex-molex which will power up a 6 port 3 pin fan hub and a molex to floppy for the sound card (Asus Xonar). The only issue I have now is that the SATA cables are coming from Hong Kong, where they cost £1 each. In the UK they cost £4.99 each and I'm buggered if I was going to hand over £30 for SATA wires. That means there could be a two week wait but I'm starting to realise that waiting isn't bad. I want it right

Thanks Andre! As I tidy it more and more and hide more and more of the cabling I must say the silver is growing on me. I almost painted the white upright trunking silver lol..

Cheers Whilst it won't get black paint inside that doesn't mean I'm going to neglect it any. Every cable on show will be braided (you can see the front panel header ones there, those will be braided tonight).

More done. All three USB cables have been braided in black and I've made a white floor pan with a Phobya grill in it and a 120mm Gelid slim fan. This will feed air down to the power supply, because the fan in the PSU is about 10mm from the bottom of the case (you can't mount it upside down in here). Oh yeah and I trunked those nasty orange wires that were running from bottom to top for the front panel.

/waits for that "zomg 750 WOT" PSU to go bang.

Don't sweat it man Seriously though this guy spent nearly a thousand dollars on the inside of this case. In the last photo in his build log he showed the machine powered up with multi coloured lights and the vents open with the side panel back on. A total waste of money, just for his OCD. The thing is Alienwares are all designed with the outside as the main focal point of the case. I made the mistake of cutting a window into it and it's costing me £120 just to put it back to stock because they look fucking dumb with windows cut in them. I had no choice but cut it at the time because I was running two 670s with open coolers and they were overheating really badly. If I could go back I would have just changed graphics cards or something but hey, I've managed to find a replacement panel so that's all cool. In all my years I have only ever seen one Alienware with a window cut into it that looked good and that was the original predator case that MNPCtech did. And that wasn't primarily because they did it and charged hundreds of dollars it was because that case looked OK with a window in because it had far less going on than the later models. I just want it to look stock and I did point that out more than once. This isn't going to be a "watch me paint the inside of my Alienware" log it was more electronics based and could I get it running on a stock power supply

If only you guys realised just how much work that involved. I saw a guy do it once and when he was finished he put the side back on and guess what? You don't see the insides. This is a build for my lady. All liquid cooled and some really nice hardware. Once it's built it'll be staying built unless it ever needs repair.

A Pentium? hehe not worth the bother really. So today I started making the front intake. First I cut a piece of acrylic and cut a fan hole into it. There will be a white LED fan in there. I chose this because it was pretty cheap and looked nice. And then for a nice finishing touch I let my lady take her pick from MNPCtech's acrylic grill range. They're not terribly expensive but just the cabling alone on this machine has set me back a bit and then of course there's the Titan Black, 8 core Xeon etc. Any way, in my head I thought "honeycomb" as there are lots on the design of the case.. She picked honeycomb great minds ! This will bring in lots of air for the upper part of the machine. So mobo fets, rads in the roof and so on Once this is done I need to make a false floor for the machine which will have a 92mm fan in it to feed air down for the power supply.

Yeah mine's a toaster too.

Yeah it's a shame AMD have not been more competitive. I own a 3970x and it's an epic chip, just wish it had the two extra cores I'm hopeful that whilst Zen may not beat Haswell E it will likely come close enough and carry lots of cores. I had a prototype I9 up until about two days ago. A very, very early version of the 6 core Westmere (or Gulftown) 980x. Intel were all set to release a 6 core I9 in response to Bulldozer but I guess they just had a good laugh over it instead lol. I'll tell you what though, at 4k CPU speed means nothing. I run my 3970x at an easy 4.7ghz for day to day use and can get 4.9ghz bench stable with temps 4c from the shut down point in Prime 95 and when I switched that out for the 2ghz 8 core Ivy Xeon it made absolutely no difference to my FPS at all. I really couldn't believe that but I remember reading an article about CPU power not meaning squat at 4k.

They do. But in this case they were taken directly from Dell's fan inventory and they really belong in servers, not desktops. I just want it running on standard 120mm fans that make the noise of a standard 120mm fan. The Noiseblockers in the top are 600 RPM. The reason being that the Xeon is a 60w CPU and you can't overclock it, and even with just a H55 Prime 95 makes it hit 35c. That's 8 cores BTW. So there's really no need for any noise I originally built it up for my lady who at the time scoffed at it and said she wasn't going to use it. As soon as it went out of the door she said "But I wanted that". lol. Ah well, it's back now and it'll be quicker than ever. Edit haha forgot to mention.. Get this.. So when the board died in my dream rig I put the 8 core Xeon and X79 UD3 in there whilst I sourced a replacement. I put the 60w CPU on a H110 and even in Prime I couldn't break the ambient temps of the room Seriously I think it's the coolest chip I've ever owned. Even more so than my Haswell Pentium !

Yeah when she's all cleaned and finished she's going to look pretty stunning. When I bought the case it was already quite dirty inside but getting to the front panel means about an hour of stripping down so I never did bother. The side panel arrived with my friend in Maryland, so now I just need to get some shipping quotes. I think when all is said and done it could cost me around $200 but I'm willing to pay it. Especially because I know the hardware is all pretty new and the rig should carry on for a few years yet I'm just thrilled I managed to get the Kraken on the Titan and get it in where it's at. It required some pretty serious modding to fit it there but that's where the old GPU duct fan used to go. The one complaint I had about the rig was the OEM fans. They were Nidec, which are pretty much the same sort of deal as Delta. Sodding noisy. It wasn't helped by the fact that I used to have two open cooler 670s in SLI and that was the only thing feeding them air. I used to have to run it at pretty extreme speeds to keep the GPUs under control. I'm not going to overclock the Titan though. Basically I just want the rig quiet, so when my lady games on it it doesn't drive me nuts The outside is still absolutely filthy though, so there's a good couple of hours there getting into all of the small crevices.

Update. I've been very busy today. Firstly I cleaned the entire inside of the case. It took me a few hours but it's very clean in there now, and all of the dust that was caked inside the front is now gone. So I fitted the PSU, then, ran most of the wiring. Any left over wiring will be hidden in the bottom under a floor panel I am going to make. Any way, here is the Titan Black, now AIO cooled and mounted in position. And the CPU cooler and exhaust fan. This is a unit that slides onto a hinge and lives in the roof

/Facepalm. I realised about ten minutes ago that the bolt pattern on the Corsair PSU is exactly the same as the Alienware's, even though the Alienware PSU is 10mm taller. So in a little bit I will try and fit it into the sled. I do have some updates though. Whilst I won't be painting the interior of the case I will be making it a little tidier in there than a stock unit. I'm going to use cable extensions. I already had some lying around. A couple of 6 pin PCIE left over from the build when it was working as well as two red Bitfenix Alchemy 8 pins from my R7990. I'm going to be fitting my Titan Black to this unit so I need one 6 pin and one 8 pin. Given that I already have one of each I am going to use red and black cabling. Only problem is all of the fans I am fitting are white. So I have decided to go with a red, black and white theme I ordered this yesterday for £7.50 from OCUK. At that price I wasn't going to dirty my hands tbh. One thing I will need to make is a super long 8 pin EPS to reach the board. I will have to custom mate that and will braid it black. It will run under the motherboard. I also had a look in my wardrobe and decided on the final spec. Note, some parts will be coming from X8 White Lightning (my hackintosh) which will now be scrapped, bringing me back down to just three rigs (my lady won't let me have any more but it's fair). So here will be the spec. Note, it may change, this is just a rough outline. CPU - Intel ES 8 core Ivybridge @ 2ghz - cooled with a Corsair H55 with Noiseblocker Bionic fan @ 600 RPM Board - custom Gigabyte X79 UD3 Memory - 8gb dual channel TBC. Graphics card - MSI Nvidia Titan Black - cooled with a Corsair H55, Noiseblocker Bionic fan @ 600 RPM and held on with a NZXT Kraken AIO adapter. Power supply - Corsair RM 750 Primary hard drive - Revodrive 120gb PCIE X4 Secondary hard drive/s - 6 x 500gb Seagate Pipeline industrial Sound card - Asus Xonar DX Mods. 5.25 bays will be converted into a 120mm cooling duct with a fan in the front, similar to what I did with Shocking Orange. The AIO fans will be set to push but inside, not bringing air from the outside. This is why I am converting the 5.25 bays into a cooling duct, to bring air into the top of the rig. Floor pan. I am going to try and make a floor pan for the rig to cover up all of the wiring which will be concentrated at the bottom. Cable trunking. I have plenty of this left over from setting up my cinema rig. This will house all of the case's stock wiring. 3mm black acrylic plate to cover up the fan holes I cut in the cover duct. I no longer need two 120mm fans over my GPUs. Cooling. Noiseblocker bionic fans in white for the two H55s. Two white Silverstone 120mm fans with their own controllers. One will go in the roof next to the AIO taking hot air out and one will go in the GPU cooling duct. I will tune these manually. In the front will be a Aerocool fan with white LEDs. So that should about do it for now. Last night I stripped X8 of all of its cooling ready for the Alienware. More soon. I will attempt to fit the PSU later on tonight and will post an update once I've tried it

It looks like the DVD cover for Boogie Nights.....