Project : BossFX-57

[Tech-Daddy]

This will be the work log for my newest mod, the BOSS : FX-57.
The case was designed for the Coolermaster CaseMod compettiion of 2005.
I have based it off of a 1969 Boss 302 mustang that I had a picture of of:

I love these cars!

Ok, working off of the car above, I had this to work with:

There were the prizes that I had recieved from previous rounds of the Coolermaster Competition. The actual competition was 3 rounds of modding using Coolermaster components in some varying degree.

1st round was 2 items of CM product (I believe) - top 10 progress
2nd round required 5 items I believe - Top 5 progress
and the 3 round had to be *all* CM product.

This rig is the result of successfully working through rounds 1 and 2.

The 3rd round is an all new case, all new mod. If I remember correctly, the competition started with somewhere around 40+ participants. It was a difficult run, but very rewarding.

My rig used on the 1st two rounds was actually some impeccible timing and extreme luck. Lupine, my past computer mod, was what I was working on at the time of the contest. I had already chosen the components of the mod, which turned out to be mostly all Coolermaster stuff. Then the competition rolls into the picture... and I was already a month into Lupine... "Hrmm... already have the parts qualifications met... let's see how she does!"

The rest, as they say, is history!


So, the loot in the above pic was from passing through rounds 1 and 2. I also took it upon myself to purchase a few other little trick bits that I thought would look good on the mod:

I want to take this moment to say a HUGE "Thank You" to NVidia for supporting the enthusiast community! These 2 cards were the sole result of me prooving myself to NVidia, and them believeing in this mod. They were chosen to compliment the "pipes and horsepower" theme of the mod. You'll see these cards a bit later. They are SUPER SEXY!!!! Gold Heatsinks on both sides of the card, the VPU has 2 heat pipes escaping from the front of the card to the back heat sink on the back of the card. Integrated LED lit fans in the back heatsink offer cooling performance, while giving hte card a sweet lit effect.

The memory, 2x512MB of Crucial's Ballistix Tracer line were provided to me by Crucial. I had spoken with this gentleman @ Quakecon, not believeing it was who I was speaking with. Well... he made a believer out of me! I've always been a big fan of the stability of the Crucial stick. Now I get to see how well these babies perform! The Ballistix Tracer line has embedded LED's in the top as well as the bottom. They give off a bitchen cool glow under the DIMM, as well as the chasing activity/utilization lights on the tops... beautiful black chrome/gunmetal grey heat spreaders with the orange/yellow Ballistix logo on the side... they are just purdy! Thanks Crucial!

The final piece of the puzzle, was this screaming baby of massively powerful silicon:

Yes folks, that is a raw, naked and ass kicking FX-57 CPU, and straight out of the oven from AMD! Had they not stepped into this role, I would have had one hell of a time fielding this mod the way I wanted it. Remember, this is a horsepower based mod. It is based on the old muscle cars that took Cu.In. to the extreme! The 302 was one of the best cars of it's time! I wanted this mod to incorporate "best in breed" performance parts as well. I totally did not expect AMD to step up as big as they did, but step up they did! And we all get to benefit from this! Much appreciated AMD!

The motherboard is an ECS KN1 Extreme that was won during Quakecon.

It has garnered some really good press on it's own since it's release, and I hope to put it through it's paces by the time I finally get BOSS into a usuable place!

On a test run to make sure all of the parts are in good working order:

Note the video cards, damn those things are cool!
The blue lights coming from between the slots, are blue LEDs that are attached to the motherboard. They blink randomly, and are just a cool effect!

The power supply was a Coolermaster RealPower 550 that I won during the contest. It is a non SLI model, so I had to convert it to an SLI mode to make it work with this mod! That will be noted later.

There will be several quick mods that will be performed on the equipment, comming up next!!

[Tech-Daddy]

Warranties are sooo over rated...

Strip down the 6800GT's

Those blue LED's have GOT to go!

And, while out there tearing apart perfectly good fans... I remembered that the power supply had a "watt vu meter" for the floppy bay/ . Plugged it in, and it was a backlit blue.... so what's a modder to do? Break that lil freak open! See what makes it tick!

If my wiring memory serves me correct, this is a 5mm LED running straight off of the 3.3v line!! I think I'll make it either red or white.... depending on what I find on 5mm LED's.... or possibly 2 3mm leds (one on each end of the vu meter...) hehehhe.... it just keeps on going...

[Tech-Daddy]

.... with my own blood!
This entry happened as I was stripping down the power supply for a fan swap (blue to white). I noted on the fan pull that the amp draw was differing in favor of the installed PS fan having a stronger motor... boy was I proven right! Read on intreped modder....
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So. while pulling apart the case tonight, and clearing the frame, I decided to gut the power supply, and test out the fans... see how my replacement white LED fan would compare.

Let me say this, the fan in the powersupply is a MUCH stronger fan that what is purchased in the retail channel.
Just how stong you ask? Well, the PS fan pulls .45 amps while the retail case fan that I bought pulls .13 amps. There is a serious rpm difference between the two fans, and major airflow in favor of the existing power supply fan.

While testing the fans, the PS one started to fall... I reached for it to stop the fall...POW!!! ZzzzzzZZIP! POW!!!!
ow OW!!! @(&$*(&@#@&#!!!!!!

after 10-15 minutes of papertoweling and compression on my finger tips, I finally stopped the bleeding. I took that little experience as the fan telling me "I aint a normal fan, and you had *better* put me back in the power supply if you know what's good for you... foo!" I'll figure out another way of getting the white light....

(sidebar: it took me literally 2 weeks to get my fingertips back to their semi-feelgood state! I literally had two fingertips bruised, and as an admin that types all day, you can imagine the discomfort caused from the index and middle finger throbbing from too much pressure! Don't let the little pin holes fool you! Those lil bastards were deep!!! )

Also of note, the Coolermaster power supply uses a 3 pin molex connector, just like the fan header on the motherboard... except that they rewired it a bit, they flipped the 12v and the ground, but left the signaling wire in place, go figure... so I had to pop the pins on the retail fan and shift them a bit to make sure they would work properly.

I took a ton of pics of the strip down, nothing really interesting there. Just some pics for later use to show before and after, possibly an article on the case, we'll see.

But, I figured you guys would get a chuckle outta my misfortune...

[Tech-Daddy]

*note* - the work done here was to create a new look for the video cards without pulling from their already stellar appearance. All I wanted to do was accent them a bit. Bring them more in line with the rest of the mod. from a color scheme standpoint.
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I've been doing lots of planning and sitting in the garage just looking at the case... kinda one of those meditation things, I think my wife thinks I've really lost it this time...

I needed to normalize the colors in my case, seeing as the fans are white (Intake, exhaust, blowhole and power supply fan), and the under carriage lighting will be red (under the case and under the motherboard), the fans on the video cards were more of an aqua blue and did not match with the theme. So... how does one go about changing the color of an LED that is hoplessly soldered onto the PCB's ??!?? You call for help, that's how!! (I have a buddy on another forum that does exceptional surface mount work!)

Check this out!!!

Before:

We discussed what I wanted to do with the fans, and then settled on the proper color, and he took care of the rest! This man is a PRO!!!!

What was originally blue is now a nice, glowing white!

Now, the neat bit about this next shot, is that when I got the device (an active, heatpipe chipset cooler from CoolerMaster) it had a fan in it that lit up blue. For some that is cool and all, but I don't particularly want blue in my cases anymore. So, in the Craig Tate mentality, I tried to change the color to purple for use in Lupine... everything I tried (all of which involved putting some form of red coloring over the blue LED to try and blend it to purple, that was ghetto) did not work. My buddy *not only* pulled the blue LED and replaced it with our decided upon white LED, he also noticed that the PCB for the fan was actually setup for 3 LED's and he filled the remaining 2 other spots!

So... not ony is this the *only* white "Blue Ice" chipset cooler, but now instead of one LED to light it, I have 3 to light it!!! Think I'll change the name of it from the "Blue Ice" to the "Ice Cube" or something like that. Then, as if that wasn't good enough, the guy hits the part with some cleaner that he had at his disposal, and got a large portion of the ghetto painting I did to the fan trying to change it's color!!! Just took it over the top in my book! Thanks bro!

The 2 video card fans for the Gigabyte cards are just gonna absolutely *snap* in those shiny, gold reflective heatsinks! And since they wil be SLI, the card on bottom will be lighting the card over it, I'm anticipating some nice light play there! Also, remember that the fans had a shroud of their own that was anodized to a near yellow/gold match of the heatsink color?
(Image here:

)

Well, I'm going to take those little shrouds and hit them with some matte black paint to add accent to the white light that the fans will be providing now! It's gonna look soooo cool!

I have more to post, I gotta get something to drink... more in a sec!

[Tech-Daddy]

Mmm'kay... started butchering the case out... you guys know... rough cutting the fan grills out, gouging out where you dont want metal, etc.

I have shots of those but they are all so boring, no need to post. You guys know the drill!
(modder humor there...)

But, I went up to Kinkos and hit one with a large format printer. I had my graphics printed to the native size. I wanted to make sure that my measurements that I "thought" during the design process, were accurate... this is how the stripes will lay out on the computer. Try to look through the blue tape and the stripes underneith.

That mesh work is going to take some bondo or mesh/fiberglass, we'll see what is needed.

now, the neat thing about these stripes is that right there where the word "BOSS" is, the stipes are actually stopped. So, if I want to space the stripes out a bit more... I can do it!!! But, the plan is to cut the window in the middle (where I cut the paper out of hte center of the sideways "U". Anywhere you see grey metal or white paper would be caution orange. This is what may allow me to drop the bottom stripe just enough to get it past the mesh work, so that I am only cutting on straight metal, and not trying to patch up the mesh work that was pressed into the metal.

I have to leave enough space @ the bottom of the window frame for the elevated "BOSS" logo to be built up and added on below the striping. I need metal to tap into for strength, so I dont want to cut too much away. (*note* - I ended up doing away with this in the final approach.)

I've also found some sweeet acrylic square cubes that will work great after being wrapped in that "Chrome vinyl" (from Lupine), hoping that it will look like chrome metal legs!

Anyone know of a place where a person can buy metal speaker grille mesh? I just need a little bit of it...

[Tech-Daddy]

Working on the video cards, since I got the fans back.
Did a little custom work to the cards. They have a little fan shroud that is anodized to nearly the same color as the heatsinks:

That just would not do in my case...
So I hit them with a good layer of camoflauge black (think super matte black)

Then I used a sanding block *very lightly* on the raised lettering of the shroud to strip the color off and leave the letters their brushed aluminium color.

I then vinyl dyed the power cables for each of the fans with black, and then mounted the fans and routed the cables:

And then installed the shroud....

WOO HOO!! I like that look! but I dont want to get too happy, because as I was trying to do the same actions to the fan on the other card... my power/signal/ground lines started popping off

*&@(#&(%$@!!!!!

By the time I got it back to my bench, the power *and* the ground had said "Hasta la vista..." to their respective solder points on the back of the fan...

So I broke the last remaining one, and will now be working on resoldering the lines back onto the existing solder points. (fingers crossed).

However, both of the cards will look like the above unit. I left the bottoms of the fan shrouds the gold color to aid in reflection of the light, but the top is the nice, even matte black.

[Tech-Daddy]

nice concept. Looks like it will be good. But i cant understand, even though it was free, that your using an ECS motherboard

The ECS board was free, yes. But it was also one of ECS's first jaunts into the enthusiast market. It is not one of their little economy boards that they are famed for.

ECS is trying to redeux their image, their perception within the computing public. Granted it will take more than a motherboard or 2, but they are trying. I wanted to see how well they did.

Plus, the color scheme lended itself well to a contrast to the case frame (you will see in a few posts what I did).



Hope this clears things up a bit.

[Tech-Daddy]

There will always be details in my mods, some of which will be noticed immediately... some of which will be noticed later, and some not at all!

The shrouds are not noticed unless you know that the cards are not normally covered in this way. I like all of my mods that way. Honestly, the best compliment on some of my details, is for them to go unnoticed, and for the viewer to think that the item "came" that way.

On my last mod, Lupine, I had a user email me that they did not know that Coolermaster made a purple case, and wanted to know where I got it from. After explaining through pictures that it did not come that way, and that I had actually painted it, it became clear to them it was custom.

[Tech-Daddy]

If I was not a modder, and did not have a window going on the rig, then the sliders on the drive bays would absolutely rock! But, I'm a window nut, and I just cant stand the sight of those things... soooo... OFF WITH IT'S HEAD!!!

I'm going to custom craft drive bays for the CD ROM(s) and any front facing devices. Materials that I am considering are either mesh, acrylic, or (what I'm considering) sandwiching some UV reactive orange acrylic inside of brushed aluminimum. I'm leaning very heavily to the last one, as I can cut the drive screw holes and paint the aluminium gloss black (like the frame will end up. I'm thinking that the edges will erupt with glowing orange if I embed a UV LED or 2 into the acrylic. The drive bays will not be the full height of the case, but instead built to only house the device that needs the support. Essentially, I build a 5.25 bay from the top that is riveted to the front and the top of the frame and it will support the optical drive, and the 3.5 inch bays will be built in a similar fashion, with embeded lighting.

So, I have now committed to this.
It will either be lit, sandwiched, meshed or a combo of these techniques.

And tomorrow, I go over to Harbor Freight and buy my bending brake to make this all happen!


(*note* this was changed in the end final execution.)

[Tech-Daddy]

Took a few hours this morning and built a bending station for the bending brake I picked up from Harbor Freight this last week.

I figured after I thought about how it was going to work, that I might need the ability to have the work possibly suspended under the bending brake from either side, depending on the way the bend needed to be oriented.

Attaching it to my bench would have limited me on how the material was to be handled. This way, I have all that free space under the brake to allow for the material to be under the bending surface, if it is needed.



Started out with 3 wall studs, 8ft in length.

Cut it down to the sizes I needed for the frame:

Framed it and gave it feet, then added in two supports to the feet.

Attached the brake to the top, and used 2 1/2 inch 1/4" bolts and a corresponding washer and nut on the bottom... TADAA!!!!

Oh, and here is my mascot...

If *ever* you have wondered "Why?" it takes me a bit longer to do most of my mods... now you are looking at her!!!