Project Zeal

[onevoicewild]

Dang Nick! what was I thinking? I should have thought of that.  All the money is ties up in that SSD.  We have come a long way on the cost, capacity and speed of these SSD's.  You have hurt my manhood with that big thing - ha ha haha hah  Mahhaaaa ok that's enough!  good score.

[Zeal]

Well, well, well. I got mail!

 

 

Take a guess.

 

 

Who would have thought that taking pictures of a black anodized, aluminum spacebar (Cherry profile) could be this fun (for me at least D:)?

 

 

 

My YOTS finally arrived in Vancouver. Should be getting it tomorrow or Monday! :lol:

[Zeal]

My YOTS arrived today!

Only 1 problem... Uh oh...

Poor extra Ducky spacebar...

Sent an e-mail to Mechanicalkeyboards.com. Hopefully I'll be able to get a replacement.

Without further ado, here she is!

754/999

Close up of my Aluminum space bar

Cherry profile, inserted backwards.

It just feels sooo smooth!

[MEE]

I WANT THAT SSD, it's so good in every way! 

[Zeal]

I WANT THAT SSD, it's so good in every way! 

Yeah, the RAPID mode is crazy in benchmarks

840 EVO 1TB with RAPID ON.

840 PRO 256GB

Comparison showing 840 EVO with RAPID vs without RAPID

Rapid OFF:

550 Random Read, 534 Random Write.

97398 IOPS Seq Read/89452 IOPS Seq Write

[Zeal]

It's been 35 days, and I finally got mail!

 

 

Assembling now!

[Stadiz]

Hot diggity daffodil ! 

[Pulsus]

could you please tell me the full name of the mause you got there? looks kinda cool

thanks.

[Zeal]

could you please tell me the full name of the mause you got there? looks kinda cool

thanks.

Corsair Vengeance M95 Arctic White.

I finished building the case yesterday, but I'm missing some screws for my components. They're shipping it today, so I guess I'll just take some beauty shots of it later in the afternoon when I head out.

P.S Acrylic is sharp! Don't run your finger down the lines to clear out the remaining acrylic shreds in the vents! Had to learn it the hard way yesterday, and now I have like 2-3 cuts in my fingers

[Zeal]

Kept forgetting to bring my SD card back home. Here's a tiny update while I wait for some missing parts to arrive Planning on some sleeves...

 

What do you guys think looks better?

Stacking SSDs like this:

 

or Spreading it out like this?

 

 

In the meantime, got some keycaps and a keycap storage box

[sperkowsky]

Wooo cool

Sent from my future spaceship

[ValentinM97]

Awesome. Looks good to me

[103it]

Stack them 

[Smooth Bunz]

We have the same monitor  

[TicTac]

Nice man LOVE that case this is going to look awesome!

[Zeal]

It's been about 2 months since my last update. Been a bit busy with stuff (and throwing money at keyboards/keycaps) and due to holidays, it took a while for online ordered items to arrive.

 

I started making custom cables & sleeved half of my 24pin yesterday. Forgot to take pictures yesterday though!

 

My Silverstone TD02 cooler I ordered off Amazon.com took 22 days to arrive due to holidays and such...Decided to cut and recrimp the CPU pump cable as well and swap out the disgusting sleeve...

 

Removed stock intel heatsink... The heatsink's retention screws literally cracked into pieces upon unscrewing it! Fitting the 45mm thick rad in the front of my case as there won't be any room for the fans if I were to mount it on the to of my case. Debating whether I should use it as an intake or outtake.

 

Fitting the heavy rad upside down on my front panel. Luckily, the AMD screws fit perfectly in the fan spots!

 

Original loose black sleeve & horrible heatshrinking:

 

Cut the wire, removed heatshrink...opening her up!

 

PCB and pump inside. The pump screws were pretty tight so I didn't open it up to look at the pump.

 

If anyone's curious, here's the inside of the TD02

 

Slipping a tiny amount of heatshrink to give the pump the "heatshrinkless" look to it!

 

Pump wire pretty much complete!

 

 

Sadly, the black and red wire still show a bit. Shouldn't be too noticeable from a distance though. Can't really tug on the sleeve too hard either with the small heathsirnk holding it in place. Having 3 28AWG wires in one sleeve also doesn't help with making the sleeve tighter since the sleeve is flattened instead of being round.

 

 

Will update tomorrow with 24pin completed hopefully

[Father Fuzzy]

Nice build

Looks Fantastic

[Zeal]

Nice build

Looks Fantastic

Thanks!

 

Jan 10(approaching midnight)/11 update: Finished making custom 11.5" long 24pin & fully sleeved.

---

 

12 Sleeves in:

 

Completed 24 pin

 

The back is all intertwined because of the way the PSU sits at the back of the motherboard tray. It was a PITA trying to straighten the 24pin when the back was literally reversed. Pin 1 went into pin 13, 2 into 14 etc.

[Quantum]

Very nice so far

[asusfan]

Hello everybody~ Building a new SFF mATX rig to place in a new office building along with some new furniture I'll be taking lots of full-res pictures, so stay tuned! Theme of the build will be White, Red, Black with a hint of stainless steel accents.

 

Asus Xonar Essence STX - Bought

 

Everything looks good, for an office rig wow, do you really need a dedicated sound card when you have amazing onboard ROG sound?

you could save some money there.

What about the reliability of a SSHD instead of a SSD for main drive?

 

amazing specs of a rig and nice colour scheme.

 

When installing the water cooler, shouldn't the water block pump plug into the CPU AUX socket and the fans on the rad into the CPU FAN ? all i know is this is what the instructions say for my Zalman liquid cooler.

[Zeal]

Everything looks good, for an office rig wow, do you really need a dedicated sound card when you have amazing onboard ROG sound?

you could save some money there.

What about the reliability of a SSHD instead of a SSD for main drive?

 

amazing specs of a rig and nice colour scheme.

 

When installing the water cooler, shouldn't the water block pump plug into the CPU AUX socket and the fans on the rad into the CPU FAN ? all i know is this is what the instructions say for my Zalman liquid cooler.

ROG's onboard sound is still a realtek chip. It's just a "glorified" one.

 

I'm sure many people here would agree that an SSD is a lot more reliable than SSHD. When you're running an SSHD, there's two points of failure(3 if you include the controller inside, and the controller is one of the most crucial item in an SSHD).

I've also always installed the pump fan plug into CPU_Fan. If I were to plug in CPU_OPT, the bios may not be happy when it doesn't read an rpm rating from CPU_Fan.

[Lauen]

ROG's onboard sound is still an realtek chip. It's just a "glorified" one.

 

I'm sure many people here would agree that an SSD is a lot more reliable than SSHD. When you're running an SSHD, there's two points of failure(3 if you include the controller inside, and the controller is one of the most crucial item in an SSHD).

I've also always installed the pump fan plug into CPU_Fan. If I were to plug in CPU_OPT, the bios may not be happy when it doesn't read an rpm rating from CPU_Fan.

You might not be aware then, that the Realtek chips in most newer motherboards is actually really good. I can confirm this, as the Realtek ALC892 and the ASUS Xonar D2X sounds pretty much exactly the same to me, and the Essence STX isn't that different The laptop I'm using right now also sounds the same. 

[Zeal]

I wouldn't say the Essence sounds anywhere close to a laptop soundcard. It depends on your audio gear and music source. I plan to get higher end high impedance headphones that will benefit from the amp.

[Zeal]

Another late night update:

 

Only got to work on the sleeving for about 2hours. Didn't accomplish much..

 

Wanted to sleeve the USB 3.0 Cable, but SATA sleeve is too small for it...So I looked around and saw my old 24pin. Started cutting the heatshrink off (heatshrink with glue is a pain in the ass to remove)

 

Once I removed the the heatshrink, the sleeve wasn't fat enough to go over the 24 pin connector...

 

So I start de-pinning it (ugh) ...Then I saw my scissors as I was taking a picture!

 

Snip

 

Check out the density of the sleeve! 5 micro plastic cords per braid!

 

Comparrison between the stock 24-pin Sleeve vs Teleios Sleeve! You can see the wires on the Silverstone one are super fine

 

So once I got the sleeve onto the USB3.0 cable, I started stretching SATA heatshrink...I hate stretching heatshrink. 4-5 heatshrinks were harmed in the process(ripped).

 

Finally got two SATA shrinks to not snap on me! Look how tight it already is on the USB3.0 Connector! I think the heatshrink was shrinking while I was taking the pic, haha.

USB3.0 Female side complete.

 

Header complete.

 

Might work on EPS & PCIE cables tomorrow.

[Lauen]

I wouldn't say the Essence sounds anywhere close to a laptop soundcard. It depends on your audio gear and music source. I plan to get higher end high impedance headphones that will benefit from the amp.

It might not sound the same, but are you sure that the Essence sounds better? The biggest problem with most soundcards is that you really need high impedance headphones to make it "worth" because of the high output impedance which ruin sound on lower impedance headphones, and even then there are much better options, like using line out from your onboard, into an o2 amp. the o2 amp is one of the best amps for under like 400$ or so, comes with a gain switch so you can set gain for different headphones. and also, integrated ROG sound should run 250 ohm headphones no problem, and if you're going in to 600 ohm headphones, you can usually get stuff that sounds the same with less resistance and probably less money spendt. The world of headphones really is moving towards low-impedance headphones. 

 

for Audio gear, external solutions are better anyway, less interference from other things inside the computer, most are driverless too (ASUS Xonar drivers suck), they have lower output impedance, and more stuff you can probably read about in the Audio FAQ. When it comes to headphones, many newer ones are low impedance, and still sound great. an example is my Shure SRH440's, they are 44 ohm, sound great on both my phone and my laptop. my M50's sound great on phone and laptop too, D2X doesn't sound that different. 

 

as for source: 320 kbps MP3 is sufficient unless you're doing like.. music production or something. but FLAC and high quality WAV doesn't do much better, especially considering the ridiculous amount of space it takes up. 

 

 

Anyway, nice build!