Project: Urgentfury

[d_stilgar]

Man, the one thing I don't love about the Stacker 830 is the difficulty in hiding cables. It's so huge you would think it would be easy, but then you use up all the cable trying to get from one end of the case to the other.

I'll have pics of my computer up soon. Good to see you around again Omega. It's been a while.

[Omega]

Man, the one thing I don't love about the Stacker 830 is the difficulty in hiding cables. It's so huge you would think it would be easy, but then you use up all the cable trying to get from one end of the case to the other.

I'll have pics of my computer up soon. Good to see you around again Omega. It's been a while.

Yeah, the damned thing is _huge_.

what I may end up doing is seeing about getting/making extensions for the cables so I can make it a little neater.

Though having the space in the back to shove cables is nice, I certainly wouldn't be able to shove them so neatly in a mid-ATX tower.

[Omega]

superminiupdate, but I decided if/when I buy the new components, I'm not going to get the ASRock.

Decided I'm gonna keep with the color theme (and mobo manufacturer) and stick with an MSI:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813130583


So I'm gonna go from an Intel Chip on an MSI Board with an eVGA graphics card to... an Intel Chip on an MSI Board with and eVGA graphics card.

At least I'm consistient, eh?

edit\\

also one of my current 120mm fans is failing so I went to a local PC store to go pick up a replacement -- a 120mm LED fan was $20! I'll just wait for my $8 fans to show up from Xoxide. ETA on that shipment is the 6th, hopefully it turns up early but if nothing else that'll probably be my next upgrade. Unless I make my way to the local acrylic shop...

[Omega]

Couple of updates today.

Ordered an eVGA GTX 550 Ti.

Installed my two 120mm yate loon LED fans, the Logisys LED light bar and the rounded IDE cable.

Before:

light bar off:

and the light bar on:

it's actually really bright, which I'm happy with. Maybe I'll see about getting a lights-off pic with it where it sits now.

edit\\

as promised:

[Neodymium]

Lookin' good how long before the evga card arrives?

[Omega]

Lookin' good how long before the evga card arrives?

Wednesday.


Also, looking at the case, the drive bay latches are visible, as is a little portion of the top section of the case. This is, of course, completely unacceptable.

So now the plan is to either get some alu or plexi and make a few covers to help make it look cleaner, as well as more lighting! I'm thinking of going with yellow cabling to accent the blue (plus it's swedish colors!). But I really am liking the "mesh window" look so I'm going to leave the mesh on there.

[Aldersan]

What about possibly making holes in the motherboard tray near the edge of the motherboard, to help hide cabling? I'm not sure how much room you have behind your motherboard tray so I don't know if it's a viable option, but it would definitely help clean it up.

Other than that, it's looking great!

[Omega]

Got the GTX 550 Ti today, installed and running.

Very first impression: Damn, this thing is quiet! Compared to the dinky little fan on the 7800GT that spun at about a million rpm (and thus made a ton of noise), the (much larger) fan on the GTX 550 means it's quieter, and just feeling the airflow coming from it is improved too. So that's good.

Updated my Windows experience index, Graphics went from 5.9 to 7.0 and 3d graphics from 5.4 to 7.0. So that's a healthy jump in performance for not much cash. I'm pleased with that. I will of course proceed with practical testing with some Fallout: NV and Left 4 Dead 2.

Some pics:

The old. 7800GT, you've been a good friend and a loyal companion, serving me with hundreds of hours of quality gaming entertainment. Even in your old age you even worked flawlessly, retaining the performance you were made with and continuing to function regardless of several times overheating due to a clogged heatsink and many hours of abuse. You'll be missed, but not forgotten.

And here you lie, on your death bed, next to your successor. May he offer as much pleasure and reliability as you have, 7800GT. May he wear the EVGA logo with pride, and deliver on promises of increased performance.

And here it is, the replacement for the legendary 7800GT, sitting in it's PCI-e slot ready and waiting to begin it's life of service.


Let's compare the specs:
7800GT:
445MHz GPU
20 Pixel pipelines
256mb GDDR3 @ 1070MHz

GTX 550 Ti:
951MHz GPU
192 processor cores
1gb GDDR5 @ 4356MHz

[Aldersan]

Okay, you got your new card, now it's time to make your case acceptable for such a nice card

[Omega]

Okay, you got your new card, now it's time to make your case acceptable for such a nice card

Trust me, this is the best looking of any card I've ever had.

The real work will happen after I get my new board and AM3+ CPU, that way i can lay out the cuts to the mobo tray with the actual board in place and make it super clean and specific for my mobo.

So right now the plan is:
upgrade mobo/cpu
do as much wire hiding as possible -- single connector IDE cable for the optical, retire my 80gb IDE HD and replace it with a 500gb SATA unit. This will make all 3 hard drives SATA.

One of my SATA drives has a weird-ass really wide connector on it for whatever reason. I've long since thrown out the documentation but I remember it urging having that specific SATA cable on it. Since I can't get the SATAs all color matched with normal cables this way, I'm going to dye the cable black and sleeve it with yellow. The remainder of the SATA cables will receive the same treatment, so that they look the same.

Part of the drive bays/latching mechanisms/etc are visible through the mesh so I want to make a cover/panel to put over that. The only issue with that is lighting -- it looks odd having a dark portion through the mesh, but there's no real space for lighting. I may just have to suck it up here and deal with it. I would like the cover to extend far enough to the rear of the case that it can be bent backwards and act as a sort of "cover" for the hard drives + their cables, so you don't see anything there. I would also set it up with a 120mm fan to aid airflow across the hard drives.

Right now what I'm battling with though is how to do the PCI-e wiring. The connector is basically in the physical center of the case and I don't want it to stick out or be like it is now, but the connector on the gfx card isn't really near a panel or something I could hide it under. What I'm probably going to do is run it behind the mobo tray like everything else and do my best to form the cabling near the card itself so that it doesn't stand out too much.

The real problem here is what am I gonna do while my desktop when it's down under the knife! Luckily, I may be getting my EEEpc up and running again soon so that'll help, but I'm not a big fan of using dinky little computers... if you couldn't tell from the full ATX tower + dual monitors