WTF I'm working on a project?
 

So um yea I've been talking to Zoson and Ben on AIM and got the urge to renovate my little Pro/Lan case. Even after all this time it's one of the nicer cases I've seen/used. I figured I might as well watercool it while I'm at it, and so another project is born.

So far I haven't done too much. I found almost all the pieces for it, scavenged up a 4x20 LCD, and then came up with a game plan. I moved the cutout on the top panel from the rear of the case to the front so that I have space to fit a 2x120mm radiator. I unbolted the hdd cage and I'm going to custom mount the PSU in the lower front of the case. This results in my being able to fit a nice cooling system, 1 5.25" bay, 2 3.5" drives, and still have decently well designed airflow and cooling. ATM things are a bit "floppy" still because of mods I had to make to get the doors to go back on after flipping the top piece around, but that's nothing some magnetic strips won't solve.

Pics?

http://phaestus.procooling.com/prolan2/prolan1.jpg
http://phaestus.procooling.com/prolan2/prolan2.jpg

I'm going to buy the PSU today and start on electrical stuff.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

ICQ... but yeah! :) I forget where you said the PSU was going exactly but I think the front of the case would be good. What PSU did you have in mind? Maybe a high end micro ATX? That'd save a lot of space if they make one that can run your system.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Wow... work by a PC staffer! I never expected to hear that!

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

It comes in like 30 minute increments followed by 18months of sloth

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I even felt like doing something, I got the F'n IRC server back online and working better than ever... hehe It now doesnt freak if no admin is in the channel and you try to join.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Your 6600 could use some cooling ;)

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

One of the things that was bugging me about pro/lan was that the back plate for PSU plug and switch was not the right size and looked pretty ghetto. So I found an old 380W Antec Truepower PSU and carefully trimmed the back off of it. It looks much nicer now:

http://phaestus.procooling.com/prolan2/newback.jpg

I'm going to get some paint for this piece so it looks nice when I'm done. Not sure if I'll paint it metallic silver or black...

If you notice, it has a molex connector on the back too so you can plug in devices that way. I thought that was kinda cool.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I played around with radiator placement over the weekend and got things more or less set up I think:

http://phaestus.procooling.com/prolan2/rad_under.jpg

I THINK there'll be clearance for the motherboard; I'm a bit worried about hoses vs. memory sticks but hopefully it'll be ok.

http://phaestus.procooling.com/prolan2/rad_top.jpg

Looks super clean from up top though :)

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Zoson: pH do you realise what's happening right now?
pHaestus: huh?
Zoson: we're witnessing the birth of the first new content on procooling in years.
pHaestus: ahahahahahahahaha.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

And then there was silence :)

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

pH is back in action, no worries. He sent me those grills I asked him for in... november was it? :D Along with some other goodies.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I was devastated into inaction when Ben's paypal e-check bounced :(

Actually I just bought a new bicycle and have been tearing up banks and parking lots and teaching my kid how to do wheelies and shit:

http://phaestus.procooling.com/haro/master1_sm.jpg

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Give me your address and I'll send you a money order. hehe, sorry about that :hammer:
EDIT: BTW that bike looks friggin sweet! :D

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

sorry I've been out of town for 2 weeks in Hawaii. And now I'm (predictably) swamped at work again. Wheee

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Any progress? (Guessing not but heres some motivation) :hammer:

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

pHaestus Looking at the case you have... it doesn't look like it has changed much over what 4-5 years?

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Here's some motivation!
I'm just about done with my new box!
catch up pH!

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I must have modded 3 boxes in the last couple years...

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I'm guessing no big updates, but some pics of your new C2D box would be nice, is it in the Lian Li? And you said you would be watercooling something soon... I'll post up pics of my new server soon, when its almost done. (Yeah, its been a long time, but I have all the hardware I want now:))

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

OK, slacker. I'm guessing this is why you don't get much done anymore. TENURE. :D


http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20090501.gif

Sorry, but reading this comic just made me think of you, pH.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Well... It'll have been two years since you were going to work on this pretty soon, heh. What did you end up doing?

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

I stand by my earlier comment on tenure. :-)

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

The tenure part is mostly true. Membership has its privileges.

As far as Pro/Lan goes, I actually decided for form over function for my watercooling, and my e6400 system (it's old already but it has an ATI 5850 in it and I think I may throw another fresher CPU in for fun) is actually in an AMS Gtower Server that is I think all ready for water now. My problem is I have L4D2, GTA4, and a few other games via steam (and SC2 beta!) but no time to play them. Such is life.

Last August I drove 1200ish miles one way to go to Madison to hang out with Joe for Great Taste; I still have my priorities straight as far as Procooling goes!

My wife and I also had our 3rd kid (all boys) on April 29 this year. Man I'm getting old.

I've been focusing mostly on other things (obviously) but over the last week or so I've rebuilt my home LAN's network:

1) Ran CAT6 from my HTPC to the basement router for better movie streaming. Jesus Wireless G sucks

2) Reflashed my linksys router with tomato to see if I could get more pleasant browsing experience with torrents running. QoS rocks! This worked out really well.

I'm also revamping our storage and data backup system by buying an Acer Home Server. I'm gonna buy it this weekend in Calgary to save 5% PST :). I have big plans for this to successfully back up and manage all our PCs, serve as an air video server for ipad/iphone/ipods, serve as a central itunes server, and then the usual media storage. It will also work as a bittorrent server (web access to start and store torrents) and a few other goodies. It's gonna need to be fed some 2Tb hdds I guess...

I find myself really impressed with things like iphones and that WHS system more than the PCs themselves. I did migrate all my PCs to Win7 Ultimate and have been enjoying that. I am planning on moving most of our PCs to low power alternatives rather than performance monsters. I'm kinda in the situation now where ALL of our PCs almost are pretty dated and so I'm trying to be efficient about who is using what and then replace accordingly.

Anyway I'll at the least post a bit here; especially when I get my WHS set up and dialed in. I honestly do most of my tech fiddling either with the HTPC and tweaking our home entertainment, or with my iphone. I'm really looking forward to getting an iPad soon; I went paperless in my office Jan 10, and I think for meetings and reading technical papers and editing and e-mail and a lot of the stuff I do at work (and on the couch) it's going to really fill a cool niche. Or maybe I'll air video porn to it all day who knows.

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

Damn man... I'm still using XP on all my boxes. Using OS X Tiger on an eMac too... but that's different. I tried Windows 7 when it came out on an Athlon XP box, and it ran pretty good. But I just wandered away from it, not sure why. My main c2d box runs XP and OS X Leopard... The laptop I use pretty much only for it's composite video input (for watching TV) runs windows 98, as well as a baby AT box I use to run older games and stuff like that. I have no real plans of upgrading my main box, it has an 8800GT, 2 GIGs of RAM and some C2D @ 3 GHz, so nothing I'll grow out of soon. I would give Windows 7 a try, but don't see a benefit at the moment other than the good looks. My two laptops also just run XP... only run Outlook and FireFox for the most part. My server is pretty impressive for my standards ATM though, it's in a rack case, has two Opteron 2 GHz chips, a gig of ECC, 5x WD 500 GB drives on a cheap'o hardware controllor. 200 MB/sec on a benchmark, and 2 TB of space with redundancy - im all set :)

Re: WTF I'm working on a project?
 

You guys aren't the only ones still watching this thread.

Yes, WHS kicks butt. I'm excited to see what Vail offers, but the entirely new storage model will make me a slow adopter.

Definitely loving Win7 x64. I think it's more stable than XP, uses RAM better, etc. And it knows how to handle my Vertex 60GB, which has been a shockingly huge upgrade. I get a lot of mileage from the keyboard shortcuts to move & resize windows too.

Watercooling has been retired, at least for the time being. When I went 775 a couple years ago, the G4 Storm required machining, and I'm a lazy bastard. The daily office PC conked out a while back, so I bought a Newegg combo with a Gigabyte 785G and Athlon II 245. The stock HSF is actually good enough! With Speedfan holding it below 700rpm, I can't hear it and CPU temps stay fine.

We've come a long way in the last 5 years, which probably explains the activity level around here.