Case Pics

[Lithotech]

[quote=ipaine;51672]... I am very aware of the "cable management" issues in my case. I have thought of doing some cutting and re-routing but have decided that I'll just wait until I get either a new case or get rid of the 3 IDE hard drives. Those damn IDE cables are just evil to work with./quote]

Dude! There is only so much youy can do with the 900! Especially with that PSU and it's thick tenticals... err bundle of cables!

Always room for improvement, but you have it manageable and of course need the extras like the sunbeam fan controller, to make it more pleasurable to use. It all adds up to quite a bit of wire to stash in a case with no stash room.

I prefer ribbon IDE instead of rounded. Rounded ends up taking up more room in the end, but sometimes it's worth the tradeoff. If you take your time with ribbon IDE, keeping them parallel to the airflow and fold them for making right angle turns, they can easily be burried underneath everything else, take up virtually no room and sometimes be mostly invisible. For me, rounded are the PITA, always springing out of place and adding inches to the bundle in cable stash. One situation that I use rounded is in my HD-setup/server system, it's such a long haul from the MB to the drive that my longest ribbon cable is almost taunt and completly blocking airflow. Popped in an extra long rounded cable I had, and poof... gone! Outta sight! Routed behind (in a case with gobs of space), you can hardly see it.

From what I see, it looks like the bulk of your, ummm, bulk, is made up of blue rounded cable? Try replacing one with ribbon, burried under the works, and see if it helps. If it does, go for the next one! I'd love to see updated pics if you try!

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[ipaine]

Well now it is even more cramped as I have added a second 8800GT to the mix. But I am seriously thinking about using the ribbon cables as you said, at least to see if I can make a difference. Or I guess I could always just get a really large sata drive and pull out two of the IDE ones.

Well once work calms down a bit I will see what I can get done and then take some new pictures.

[Eagle Eye]

Well it finally arrived and I put it all together without a hitch, getting all the cables in the back was a bit of task I spent over 3 hrs yesterday an about a hour this morning getting it just right.

Thanks for taking a look

[MpG]

This is my secondary rig now, figured I'd toss it up here for posterity. It was originally running on a Koolance Exos-2 system for awhile, but I just finished switching everything over to Thermalright. Had to drop the Quad down to 3.2 GHz when I went to air, but the loudest item is the front Noctua running at only 1100 rpm. Pretty tight fit around MSI's Circuspipe setup, sliced my fingers more than a few times getting the heatsink fan installed properly, but nothing is rubbing.

On Water:


On Air:

On an aside, the piece of foam tape on top of the TRUE is to help force the air to pass through the fins - as near as I've been able to tell, it's worth 1-2 degrees improvement, even at low fan speeds.

On another aside, note the "giant" PSU needed to run an OC'd Quad and G80 video card (the PSU fan barely begins to ramp up at max load).

[sswilson]

Looks great! I'm always impressed at how well folks can get their wires under control when they put their mind to it.

Is the "kooldance" item on the first picture the pump? If so, is it secured to the bottom or just hanging on by the tubing?

[MpG]

No, the rad/pump unit is on top of the case, I just didn't get around to taking full pictures when I had the chance. That little black block is just a splitter that I used to install a water temp sensor. It's a bit of a flow-killer the way I had it set up, but the tubing was being a real bastard to route into the GPU block w/o kinking, so I wound up just using the splitter as an elbow.

[Lithotech]

Originally Posted by ipaine

Well now it is even more cramped as I have added a second 8800GT to the mix. But I am seriously thinking about using the ribbon cables as you said, at least to see if I can make a difference. Or I guess I could always just get a really large sata drive and pull out two of the IDE ones.

Well once work calms down a bit I will see what I can get done and then take some new pictures.

LOL, 2nd 8600GT > less cramped!

LOL, large SATA drive = more cramped because you will leave the other two drives in the system!

Found a recent pic showing a ribbon cable taking up no space. Still looking for good example of when I use rounded.

You can see the single ATA133 cable running off to the right, goes behind the drive bays, folds up and to the DVD, then wraps around and underneath the drive to make the connection.

[Sethasstor]

[enaberif]

more will follow ;)

[Theblackmages]

seth... what the hell are you doing here!?!? haha, remember me from pp and techbums?

Nice case man, looking into painting the inside of my 690 , matte looks good, did you use any sort of primer and does it sratch off easily?