Yeah I didn't expect it to be flashing and so goddamn bright, but I love it. This is gonna be kickass.Quote:
Originally Posted by OvRiDe
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Yeah I didn't expect it to be flashing and so goddamn bright, but I love it. This is gonna be kickass.Quote:
Originally Posted by OvRiDe
Also since TBCS is my home and I like you guys the best (shhhhh) I'm gonna be using this thread as my idea dump and only updating other forums on the actual progress.
So, to that note, the LED strip is stupid long. Like, 16.4ft long. And I see no sense in letting it go to waste. It has a nice rubbery kinda coating on it to protect the LED too, which is nice.
It's looking like I'm going to remove the bottom drive mounting bracket (which is fine because I only have three drives anyway) and put the LED controller down there. I'd like to run the IR receiver to one of the slats that are open alongside the front panel, which may prove to be...tricky. But the receiver is pretty much perfectly sized for that so it'd just be a matter of getting it glued in place. Perhaps I'll cut the wires for the receiver and add a little connector to it so I can remove the front panel more easily.
Anywho, back to the length. The controller will be mounted under the drive bays. The LED strip will then go along the bottom, up the back, along the top, down the front and back to the controller.
I'd then like to run the LED strip towards the back of the mobo tray, up through the big hole there and positioned so that the motherboard is "backlit".
If I still have sufficient left over after that, I have been toying with the idea of putting the LEDs against the chassis behind the front panel so that the light shines through the open holes down the side. All three of these would essentially make the entire case glow whatever color I wanted. Either that, or run them along the underside of the computer.
It would be easier in terms of routing to cut and solder these things so that I don't have to run the strip itself everywhere, as it's not very flexible side-to-side, only back-and-forth; understandably so. Only issue I see with that idea is the fact that I have no idea how hard it would be to scrape off the resin and solder wires on... Perhaps I'll have to buy another length of LED strip just for this purpose. :devious:
Another thought, related: There isn't enough room on the back panel to run the LED strip next to a 140mm fan. There would be, if I ran a 120. For the sake of simplicity, I'll probably get a 120. On that note, if anybody wants to trade my Fractal Design Silent Series R2 140mm fan for your Fractal Design Silent Series R2 120mm fan, shoot me a PM or something and let's talk. Or a similar style 120mm fan with an emphasis on "quiet"... really just for aesthetics, with all the other airflow in the case I'm sure that making sure that one fan matches 100% isn't paramount. So to that note, any low noise, black frame / white blades fan would work fine. Seriously, shoot me a PM.
Aaand another thing, I hate the feet on this thing. They're rubber. It's a big, heavy, bulky computer. I want casters, goddamnit. I'll probably look at my Stacker 830 and see if I can nick it's casters. Would make it a lot nicer to move it around on carpet versus actually having to lift the thing.
Oh, so some boxes arrived today. I've been getting a lot of friggin' boxes recently...
But these ones were neato, they had the Corsair logo:
And within their confines, gold awaits:
Literally a pile of modular PSU cables.
The neat thing about this is that these cables are compatable with all kinds of corsair PSUs, so if I decide I want to upgrade my PSU later to something insane like an AX1200i or whatever, I can just pop the RM750 out, put the new PSU in and hook it back up, voila.
The weave is nice and tight, the wires underneath are white too but the heatshrink doesn't "tuck" in to the connectors so there's a little white showing right before the connector on most of them. Not a huge issue, just worth mentioning.
There's less and less reasons for me *not* to move my hardware over...
I think they look great too! I don't know if you are aware.. but you can section those and interconnect them with wiring. This is handy if you want to do 90 deg. angles and such. Most strips will have markings on where to cut, and then you just solder some wires. Google should reveal a bunch of tutorials.Quote:
Originally Posted by Omega
Yeah I've seen LED kits like this before, I suppose it's just time to read up on it and everything. The only real bit I'm concerned about is getting the plastic resin off of the strip so I can get to those solder points, though I suppose it's just a matter of cutting it down carefully with a razorblade, and figuring out the routing for the best results.Quote:
Originally Posted by OvRiDe
I suppose I should strip the case down now so it'll be easier to figure all that stuff out.
Just placed another order for another box to show up at my house... :whistler:
Okay so I can't not share with you guys.
I ordered an EVGA GTX 660 Superclocked and OCZ Synapse 128gb SSD together off of newegg for $200.
The GTX 660 has the regular centrifugal fan cooler which I know will be loud as hell, so I emailed EVGA asking if I can purchase or trade for the ACX cooler that they offer. The GTX 660 should offer double the performance of the GTX 550Ti that I'm running right now and with the ACX cooler (or even the normal cooler) will look a lot nicer than the 550 with the huge Arctic cooler which sticks out in weird ways. Don't get me wrong, I love the Arctic cooler. It's quiet, and cools fantastically.
Right now I'm off to go strip out the case in preperation to figure out the routing for the LED lighting and get that all situated. GPU porn to come likely Tuesday or Wednesday when it arrives. Stay tuned. ;)
Okay so I know I'm kinda spammy with the updates but whatever, bite me.
Remembered that my old Biostar Puro Hi-Fi motherboard has identical standoff locations to the Biostar TZ77A that I'm running now, so I figured I would use it to line up the standoffs. Then I decided to screw it in. Then I decided to run some cables and test fire to make sure the PSU actually gave power.
Here it is in place, cables messy, just to verify power.
Ran the cables behind. This is gonna look *good*.
And although it's dirty and blurry, this is vaguely what it'll look like with the i5 setup in there. Obviously it'll have it's back panel on and it'll have a GPU and everything too.
The Corsair cables are nice, but still kinda stiff. The 24pin ATX connector is harder than all hell to try and get to click in to the mobo, which is a bit concerning. The 4pin worked fine on this one. Cable management is going to be interesting behind the scenes given how tight everything is.
The Fractal 140mm fans are so quiet that I don't think using the built-in fan controller on the front panel will be necessary. Still, I think I am going to splice the wiring together so I can run all six fans off of it just for simplicity's sake. Wiring definitely is going to be the big challenge here... I want to hide as much as I can, but I still want to have plenty of the nice, sleeved white cables showing. Also it would be nice to get some cable rakes so that the wires don't get twisted or weird, and stay nice and straight and orderly. More money...
Looking nice, the black and white is a great colour scheme! Good to know that Corsair sells pre-sleeved modular cables in case I ever get around to working on my main rig and the AX850 in it. Might want to check the ratings on your fan controller before splicing all the cable together as the amperage draw from fans can add up quick.
Coming together nicely, keep it up!
New video soon...
