Cleaning up an old full tower

[jfb9301]

I've been working on this machine on and off for almost 6 years. I haven't always kept it tidy, and I hardly ever documented my work. I am now at a point where it might be nice to share what it is that I have crammed in this thing.

I long ago set a few rules for myself with reguard to mods on this case, or mods in general for myself. First and foremost, NO FLAIR. I have no need for flashy bright shiny objects to draw attention to something. It is either nice and functional, or I have no need for it. CCFLs are just straight out, not going to happen. For this mod here I got to thinking that everyone does cable ties, zip ties, spiral sleeving or braided sleeving. So I decided to revive the lost art of "cable lacing", that was used before zip ties were invented (I'll be showing some pictures of it later).

Along the way I have had the great luck of a friend of mine who goes by Skittles sponsoring me by buying me parts and loaning parts to me. Thank you to him, I could not have done it without you.

The Victim:

6 year old full tower. Originally housed a P3 500 Katami, ASUS P2BF, TNT and VoodooII SLI. It has been modified several times over the years. More fans here and there, power supplies, new boards and new processors. I'm modding it in preperation for the LGA775 mainboard and prescot (space heater) that I will be putting in soon. In the mean time it houses a ASUS P4G8X delux running a P4 3.06 @ 3311. This is currently on loan from my friend, so hats off again.

One obious mod from here, I took off the stock tower stands and put the whole thing on castors. Much easier to roll around than carry. The whole thing weighs almost 50 pounds without the UPS on top. This is one solid steel chassied tower.

 

[jfb9301]

This is a 80 conductor ATA133 cable that I sliced and rounded myself. It is a good example of "Cable Lacing" I intend to lace all major cable runs in the tower.

up close and personal on that lacing.

 

[jfb9301]

Rule # 2

Hand made is by far preferable to store bought.

No store bought fan busses will be found here. Me and my trusty Weller soldering iron can make our own. DeWalt and Dremmel, will be found here, but not much if any in the way of after market mods.

note the OrangeMicro front pannel USB is on the way out, I'm going to put in the hand crafted Front Pannel USB jack that I made 3 years ago.

 

[jfb9301]

Backside of the Victim:

Note 120mm Fan, above and to the right of the fan is the mini-toggle switch that controls the fan speed +7Vdc and +12 Vdc. These fans (I have 2) are 5 Watt monsters made by sunon. At 12 Vdc the noise that they make is almost intolerable, but they move a metric buttload of air. At 7 Vdc they are comperable to the sound of an 80mm fan but move much more air than an 80mm fan.

Up close and personal with one of those monsters

And the Fan Speed Switches

 

[jfb9301]

This is my Home-Fabricated Front Panel USB Jack

Yes, that is a 3.5 cover reverse mounted as a spacer and an expansion slot cover used to hold the USB plug in place.

 

[jfb9301]

This is a "Before, After, and Installed" of my P4 12V 4Pin cable.

 

[jfb9301]

This here is a Saphire 9600Pro Advantage....(uuurrrrg there is no frigging advantage about using TSOP RAM that won't clock over 500Mhz when things advertised as 9600Pros have ram at near 600Mhz)

Anywho, I took a pair of ramsinks clearly destined for a reference GF2 or GF3 where all the ram is in 2 banks of 4, and hacksawed them so that the resulting bits could fit on my widly spaced 4 banks of 2 on my 256MB card.

The diminutive cooler thoughtfully supplied by Saphire is now somewhere under my bed. Replaced by an iCEBERQ 4.

I now have the card clocked 478 core (way over the 390 it shipped at) and 506 memory (shipped at 466, but a mear 6 Mhz over the 500Mhz rating of the TSOP memory modules that were on the card). This delivers just over 1900Mtexels fillrate and about 8.2 GB/s bandwith. Running a cool 26C idle and 37C Load. How is this, 9600s don't support tempurature readings? I have a home made temp probe, I made years ago (to monitor aforementioned P3 500 Katami) shoved under the heatsink contacting the heatsink right next to the core. so I'll include a couple pics of the tempurature probe.

The Tprobe pictured has red/white leads. The one in use on my 9600Pro has white/black and can be seen as the white line near the center of the video card picture, with the white/black leading off the card above and to the right headed to the TPSU jack on my motherboard. I really don't care what tempurature my PSU is at, it is no where near its rated 480 Watts (besides, my PSU does not have a connection for monitoring its tempurature, but I really do care about the tempurature of my overclocked video card.

 

[jfb9301]

comments, questions, suggestions?

feel free to post them. I'd really like your input guys and gals

 

[Kckazdude]

Some old skool wire mods. Sweet, havent seen it done in a while.

 

[jfb9301]

heh... I guess it is old skool.....

I've been [H]ard since before that P3 500. I stopped being active on the forums about 4 years ago and cant find my old login info. Since I don't have the same email as I had back then I can't have the info sent to me either so I guess it's back to being a noob for me.

EDIT

I did some backward looking and figgured out that I was coming to [H]ardOCP in the fall of 1998 when I got my K6-2 300 and was starting overclocking of that processor (not that I was new to overclocking, I started with a 486SX25 and jumped it up to a whopping 33Mhz).

I figgure in the spirit of Halflife2 and old-skool... I would post something from the fall of 2000. I don't know who created it, tho their (c) mark is still on it. If they have any problems, I will happily pull it down. This is the source file for the [H]ARD-LIFE case badge that apears in the first photo of the victim.

/EDIT

I work around industrial electronics. A lot of our stuff still uses 1940s era stuff like "cable lacing" I need to know stuff like that to repair stuff at work, I figgured it would be neat to use it in a mod since I don't see too many other people doing it. True specs for lacing the cables would include lacing the different cables together into larger bundles so all my ide cables would be laced together into one bundle. Since I do not know the exact layout of the Asus P5AD2 delux that I want to put in here, I'll have to wait till I get it to truely finish the work. In the mean time I'll keep working on prep stuff.

still to work on

Lacing the power rail for the drives.
every thing in the upper half of the tower.
probably more but I can't think of it right now.

 

[jfb9301]

Yes, even my Joystick/Gamepad is not safe.

This here is my Gamepad. Xbox controler (one each), Modified to USB, Logo is stencil cut and back lit (yes a minor bit of flair here, was done more as a proof of concept that I could light stuff up by powering LEDs off the +5Vdc available in USB). I'm using the XBCD drivers available here http://www.redcl0ud.com/ which provide a large amount of customizable controls including rumble and support for the analog buttons (not that any game supports them)

and lit up

Stencil cut logo

LED bus

USB Cable mod

 

[jfb9301]

Cable lacing has some advantages over Zip Ties and other meathods of tie downs for cable runs.

- Less likely to damage the insulation. Over tightened zip ties can "cold flow" the insulation and create local areas of reduced resistance to ground or phase to phase short.

- Less likely to damage Fiber Optic cableing. Over tightened zip ties can damage the optical qualities of FO

- Zip Ties can become brittle over time and may break. Cable lacing is not succeptable to this mode of failure

- Vibration resistance (hmmmm fans anyone?) brittle zip ties under heavy vibration may fail. Cable lacing will not.

- Better under high current applications (I highly doubt this applies in a computer) Zip Ties will trap more heat under them. Therefore increasing the effects of 1,2 and 4. Cable lacing definitly traps less heat than spiral wrap or braided sleeving.

how to cable lace

I use a variant of the above using a locking stitch in adition to the half hitch. This prevents the hitch from slipping loose and sliding.

This has a little more background

 

[linger]

looks like a good thread, cant wait to see some more pics .

 

[jfb9301]

Took a few days off to enjoy the computer.....so now a minor update

Did my taxes , a major part of this upgrade. managed to increase my upgrade budget by over 40% (the warden didn't even blink when I told her that I was grabbing up another 400 of the tax money...... I wonder what she has up her sleeve), so now I'm looking like around $1400 to invest in ASUS P5AD2-premium with 925XE chipset and official 1066 FSB support, Pressie, ram and PCI-express. I'm hoping I can get the ASUS bios to unlock the multiple of the Pressie and drop the multiplier to 14. This coupled with some _seriously_ good ram (good DDR2 675 or better) and a willingly cool 800Mhz FSB Pressie and I should be able to hit 1066 FSB running the pressie right around 3733 (I'm expectin this is doable on air, but I'm not expecting any headroom beyond this). This also puts the ram right around DDR2 710.

spent some time working on it this afternoon. Laced the power rail for the drives (no pics of that)

made some chafing guards to cover the sharp metal edges separating the upper and lower halfs of the tower. This ought to keep those razor sharp edges from cutting though the insulation on the wires going through the opening. They ended up looking fairly smooth, so I dressed the edges of the hole for the 120mm fan in the back.

covers those rough edges rather nicely I think.

 

[jfb9301]

After some concideration of routing stuff I decided that it will be hard to do much more in the way of prep work and much more needs to be focused on things after my upgrade.

on a side note I ordered my $1460 worth of parts yesturday.

ASUS P5AD2-E Premium 925XE 1066FSB
INTEL 560J 3.6 GHz Pressie
2x512 Corsair Balistics PC-5300 DDR2-667
Zalman 7700 CU
Arctic Silver 5
ABIT X700Pro

I should have a busy weekend ahead of me, as the parts should all be in on Friday. Cross my fingers I should be able to get the 133 of overclock to get 3733 on that pressie, a 1066 FSB, and DDR2-711 (Asus lists the balistics 256M modules on the AVL to make 711, but not the 512M ones).