A Computer Case

[Angry_Steel]

Sprinkler line filters, one for each loop, believe its 80 microns. I did have some laboratory disc filters ordered at 20microns but they were really expensive and I would imagine complete overkill, so I picked up these awhile back. I think Jaydee did a rundown a couple weeks ago on one he picked up.

[jaydee]

Yeah, if you have SwissFlow SF800 flow meter they recommend a 20 micron filter in front of it. I got a 150mesh filter and it works good. Can't imagine how anything large enough could get past that screen even though I don't think it is 20 microns.
Here is the link to mine: http://forums.procooling.com/vbb/showthread.php?t=12311

[n00b 0f l337]

Hey what are the dimensions of the box? And why not use poplar?

[Angry_Steel]

I would have done a whole lot of things different if I was still back in the US. Here in Spain (At least where I live), not sure about the rest of Europe, wood of the quality that you can pick up at your regular Home Depot, is nowhere to be seen. I have yet to see a full sheet of plywood or a solid piece of any wood other than Eucalyptus or Olive wood. All the pine in the stores is mostly finger-jointed pieces/parts that is straight only under the climate control of the store, and as soon as you bring it away from there it starts to warp, and for that, you pay about quadruple what you would pay in the US. You can imagine what any good piece of wood would run. Hence my choice of MDF, cheaper, more durable, doesnt warp, glues well, machines well (No Grain) and good sound qualities.

The outside dimensions are roughly 23.5" x 23.5" x 23.5" , and inside 19" x 19" x 19". The same for the second box that I will continue on with soon.

[TerraMex]

(offtopic) I'm thinking of getting more of those quickconnects some for myself, so if you or anyone else want some PM me and we'll get a bulk deal together perhaps?

Thanks but i'm low on $$ right now ...

PS: ... and customs have a bad habit of holding UK packages up to one month.
i can get stuff from Norway or Germany in two days, but from the UK? nooo.

[Angry_Steel]

Latest Update

Sorry for the delay to anyone who has been following this thread, Ive had other things going on and havent had a chance to update anything. Here is the latest happenings along with a couple of pictures. Better pictures soon when I drag the thing outside.

Ive continued work on the top case where the main components will go. Originally I had sheet steel to plate the entire inside of the case with. Unfortunately, with the high humidity here and being close to the coast with the salt air, I had immediate flash rust on the first piece that I attempted to use. I switched to 1mm Aluminum, but I first had to get the piece of steel off after using professional contact cement. Here are some pics of the results.



Needless to say it took quite a lot of effort to get that damn thing off. Then I had to clean off all the contact cement which took a half a bottle of Acetone, 3 razor blades, and a lot of elbow grease.



After that I started cutting the Aluminum and fitting it to the panels. I have most of the Aluminum cut and have been alternating between painting it and cementing it.



The power supply box is fitted to the top and is plated with aluminum and painted black. The whole inside will be painted. More pics when I can get better lighting outside tommorow.

[Etacovda]

"Needless to say it took quite a lot of effort to get that damn thing off. Then I had to clean off all the contact cement which took a half a bottle of Acetone, 3 razor blades, and a lot of elbow grease."

Three words, random orbital sander

You would have been done in about 3 minutes

[Angry_Steel]

You dont sand off contact cement, unless your looking for an even biger mess to recover from. Contact cement does not turn into something sandable, so in order to sand it off you would have to use low grit sandpaper. After sanding it for about 3 sec, you could replace the disc as it would be unusable anymore due to the buildup. Also in the process of sanding your going to be destroying the wood by grooving, as your removing the glue by ripping up the wood that it has bonded too.

The right tool for the right job, in this case: Acetone and Elbow grease.

[Etacovda]

I figured slight grooving wouldnt matter, as you only need the surface relatively flat to replace the MS with alu panel... understandable to care about grooves/finish if you're painting etc, but if you're replacing a laminate i would have just sanded. Each to his own of course.

Great work, btw, I like it.

[Angry_Steel]

If it was concrete or a sub-floor or some other thing I wouldnt think twice about it. For this though I want to have a nice clean even surface to work on (anal retentive? probably). Also it helps to erase the stupidity of wasting so much time cutting steel with a jigsaw and then having it flash rust over night, and having to rip it back off again. Consider it penance.

Thanks, its taking far longer than I had originally planned, but I figured I would make it last for awhile. Ill get it done just in time to have everything switch over to BTX. lol

[Angry_Steel]

Ive been working on the front-inside panel today among other things and thought I would pop some pictures up. This panel was the most work, and Im glad to get it out of the way. I just finished up cutting slots for the fan-module hinges in the aluminum, so they would sit flush insted of just being screwed on top.





Then after some sanding, priming, sanding and little paint we have it done.



Next stop is painting the 3 fan modules, and assembling and mounting the front panel (3 parts). After that I need to frame for the side doors and build the doors.

[Angry_Steel]

Lots of little and not so little things done. The whole inside has been plated with aluminum sheet and painted. All the holes for the power cables, tubing etc have all been drilled. The actual construction is done now, just assembly and painting left to go. Right now Im finishing up on my last coat of Bondo on the screw holes, etc.



Hard drive/powersupply side. Hard to see anything actually.



Motherboard Side, the holes are for the cables to run into the seperate power supply box, they have foam between to minimize any abrasion to the cables and also to eliminate airflow between the different sections.



Top view where you can see the interior lid of the power supply box. The power supply is completely seperate from the entire computer and has absolutely no role in cooling anything but itself. Its fed by its own 120mm fan.



Motherboard side showing holes in the base for the water-cooling tubing. The set of holes at the back is for the CPU and the ones in the front for the GPU. The tubing for the CPU will go behind the motherboard and over. The ones for the GPU just up and in.



Back view. Cardboard is in preparation for painting the outside.

Currently Im still busy plating the doors with Aluminum, and making the front bay door which will keep dust off the cd/dvd etc.

[ElMoIsEviL]

Wow... that's a sweet case. I wonder how well that watercooling kit is going to perform seeing as it looks pretty spiffy from the pics. Very sphisticated yet nice to look at..

[Angry_Steel]

It should be ok, its 1 block per a pump with no sharp bends or right angles. Probably a little more tubing than people would normally use but I think it will be fine.

I primarily tried to get the best of all worlds here. High performance, super quiet, good cooling, and ease of maintainence. The downside to all of that is the size and weight.

[Angry_Steel]

Well it was a beautiful day with just a little breeze, so I decided to get the rough part over with and attempt to get a good couple of coats of paint on the top part of the case.



Nice day! :thumb:



Break out the paint!







Setting it on its little brother for transport.



Actually Starting to look like something,



And a last look before it gets wheeled into the nether regions of the house.

[BGP Spook]

This is amazing.

[Angry_Steel]

I needed to make a door for the 5 1/4 bays so that I can keep them dustproof. I could have made just a black front but decided to spice it up a little. I had a window etch and decided to do a little messing around. I cut out a shape around the etch, and spray painted the back black to highlight the etches. After sanding off most of the black, I added a coat of red, and ended up with this.



After I had that, I needed to cut out the door, and use router and chisel to get the desired depth to embed the etch into the door.



I polished a piece of aluminum to a mirror finish (fun fun) and cut it to the same shape as the etch. Then I random sanded the back of the etch again to give an abstract appearence and placed the aluminum behind it. Slapped on a case badge in the square that I chisled out and one bay door.



There is a magnet already imbedded in the case, so all thats left now is putting the handle on, and the catch for the magnet, and the hinges.

[Angry_Steel]

I have been finishing up on the rest of the metalwork and Im pretty much complete. Heres a couple of pics.







Close up of the latches I have installed as a (really unecessary) backup to keep the top case to the bottom.

More and better pics soon, wasnt in a photo happy mood today.

[Etacovda]

jesus christ, thats HUGE. How quiet is it, in the end?

[Angry_Steel]

Well I ran the bottom so far with 5 fans the power supply and the D5's and you cant hear a thing...nothing. So I would imagine the top will be the same.

[Angry_Steel]

Where to pick up at.....

First, more pics in the days to come, just havent been taking any.

After days and days of trial and error on the watercooling end of this, I ended up making a lot of changes.

1. I removed both of the Swissflow meters from the loops. Just couldnt seem to get them working properly. One of them would put out a rpm of 17xx, and the other seemed to put out around the right rpm at 6xxx, but both of them acted super flaky when reading them in the bios (Flashing between 0-XXXX, not showing at all, fluctuation of 1xxx) Whether or not I have faulty meters or all of the problems are user errors, I dont know and Im fed up with them.

2. Replaced the intake lines for both pumps with 1/2" x 3/4" OD tygon, as I seemed to be getting some flattening with the 1/2" x 11/16" OD.

3. Removed the fixed position "Distribution Panel" with the quick disconnects....bad idea, it just added a lot of extra tubing due to its location. Instead the disconnects are now just free floating and I saved about 2ft of tubing per a loop.

4. Both D5 pumps are running at 5x speed. They are actually Silent at 5x. At 4x you start getting a noticeable whine (noticeable to me) and at anything lower than that its very noisy. This is wierd as it goes against everything Ive read in reviews saying that it is quietest at its lower levels.

5. Leak testing was fun... I never had any problems with the blocks, I spent extra time with both of them in tightening down the barbs (No PTFE) and making sure the clamps were tight. Leaks were a pain in the ass with the swissflows, and the old filters, both of which are now removed. As mentioned earlier, the inline filters I have now are about 1/10th of the size, sealed with o-rings and do a good job at catching junk without noticeably affecting flowrate too much.

6. All the connectors in the loops are 12mm ID (Actual) and 16mm OD black ABS plastic fittings. They seem to work much better than the standard crap you can buy from most computer shops. The tygon fits really snug and I doubt there is much restriction. No 90's anywhere in the loops.

Ok, so this thing has been running for about a week and a half now stable (Knock on wood) but that was achieved by no easy means. (Rant Coming)

Manufacturer woes:

Asus has been my manufacturer of choice for as long as I can remember. No more. When their stuff works, it works great, but when you need some kind of technical support, you would be better off wasting your time writing the Pope.
Im pretty damn knowledgable about doing things myself, Im 37 and Ive been tinkering with computers since my dad brought home a M6800 home from Motorola and built a table top system. So when I ask for technical support, there is usually something wrong. With my A7N8X-Dlx system, I just battered my way through all of the bugs, destroyed bios's, flaky drivers and data corruption, and ended up with one of the most rock solid systems Ive ever owned. With my current build it has been a different story.

I built this system around the Nforce 4 A8N-Sli Deluxe, and purchased a 6800 Ultra to go along with it. When I got around to opening the M/B for the first time it was missing the I/0 Shield. Ok..No big deal I thought, Ill just get a new one from the distributor, they list them for sale. (Im not big on going through RMA's, etc, Id rather just buy something if its just a couple of dollars) So I ordered a replacement and volla! Its the wrong one. So I spent the next 2 weeks figuring out that the distributor is just waiting for RMA's to come back in, and pilfering the I/0 shields to re-sell. Ok enough of that. I contact ASUS (UK) as they are the closest to me here in Spain with a email explaining my problem, and that I would like a I/0 Shield for my $160 motherboard. The reply was...

Dear costumer, thank you for contacting asus.
We appreciate that you share your complaint with us.
From the moment you bought an Asus product, you have one week to change it if you find something wrong. In your case, a missed part.
It's not common to sell this parts, because they came as part of the motherboard. The fact that this parts are not integrated in the motherboard, it's just a matter of space. But they actually are.
If the shop sold you this part, they toke it from another motherboard, because Asus do not sell motherboards parts separetelly.
We sugest you to reclaim the shop the missed part, but the fact is that it depends on them, as you shoulded reclaim this the week you bought it.
Hope they help you solve this issue.

Best regards,

Asus Ibérica.

My reply was less than civil as I have never heard anything about this 1 week crap, and here they are telling me to go deal with the distributor again.... the next reply to that was:

We apologize for the inconvenience. Hope you understand that our stock depends on our official distribution channel, which means the computer shops and distributors. Please, try to contact them to see if they can get you this missed part.
What we explained to you is the description of a standard process we use for years and nobody complains about it. Even the costumers are happy with the service we provide.
Hope this issue with the computer shop does not change the way you think about our brand.
If you have any question or need help with anything regarding our products, always under our standard processes, we are going to be more than happy to assist you.
Again, thank you for contacting Asus.

Best regards,

Asus Ibérica.

Alrighty then....gave the distributor one more go....and they told me to just go ahead and RMA the whole Motherboard. Yea....Ok, Im going to RMA the whole thing for a 5 cent I/0 shield and wait for 2months..... I figured ok, Ill just call ASUS in the USA as they might have a better concept of what Customer Service is. So I called them, got a nice girl who listened to my story, told me that what the guy wrote above is retarded, asked for m/b model and shipping address, and my new shiny I/O shield is on its way! Finally.... So 10 days later, my package arrives and I get a.....something that does not fit on my motherboard....again.... Back on the phone to Asus USA. Explained everything again to another nice girl, She took down all the information, M/B model, etc and made a note to make sure I got the right one this time. Ok, cool.....Fast forward 10 days later. Wrong I/0 shield....again. At least this time its closer, so I break out the nibbler's and try it out. Unfortunately, the thing is curved so badly that when you try to get the M/B in, you would need a clamp to hold it in while you screwed it down. Enough is enough...so now having had enough of the stress, I am running my first computer without an I/0 shield.

Stay tuned for part 2 of the great ASUS saga.....