First Case Mod

[hollip3020]

Welcome all!

Recently I bought the Codegen 6097-QS case (above) and after migrating my computer, I booted only to find that the drive covers that were included were crap. They allowed the drives to eject fine but the stand-offs caught on the bezels of both of my dvd drives when they were retracting. So, I whipped out my sandpaper and started sanding away hoping to get it so the drives would retract correctly. About 3/4 through sanding down the stand-offs one of the doors broke leaving me with only one drive cover and 2 white drives. Needless to say I wasn't going to allow my brand new case's awesome look be ruined by some unsightly drives. Some painting was in order.

Oh before I continue, this case came with 3 80mm semi-decent fans. 2 of which have blue and green leds. I replaced them with (all Thermaltake) 3 80mm red Thunderblade fans and an 80mm SilentCat. Also, there are two obnoxiously bright blue leds that shine through the two holes on the front of the case which promptly got unplugged. I'll be replacing those with some red ones soon. The only other problem I had was the tool-less mechanism they put it to hold the vid card, etc. that didn't work at all. Luckily it was removed easy enough (3 screws).

Here's a picture before the door broke:

I found some paint that matched the colors of the case perfectly in less than 5 min of looking at Lowe's.

Here is the case minus the drive bezels and bay covers with its guts spilling out the right side of the case (my awesome cable management):

The bezels and bay covers drying on my balcony:

The bezels and bay covers dry and installed:

Close-up on the bezels:

More pics:

I know it's simple, but everyone's gotta start somewhere!

 

[altec]

You did a very good job. Makes it look a 100 times better.

 

[CrimandEvil]

Nice job with the paint.

 

[hollip3020]

Over the weekend a couple buddies and I went out to a wealthy uncle's mansion just north of Long Beach culminating in a concert on monday night. Naturally I took my Canon S400 and my hacked CVS camcorder to document the happenings. When I got back home, however, I had found that most of the pics had gone missing. Knowing that the s400 can only access specifically named folders on the card, I figured that the pictures were just in folders that the camera couldnt read, and to get them off the card I would have to find a card reader. After asking everyone I know that lives close enough, I was unable to find one, so, off to CompUSA I went. Once there I decided on a CompUSA branded internal 9-in-1 card reader for $20.

A little more than I wouldve paid if I had bought from somewhere online, but I was impatient.

In the package was the card reader (pictured above), a 4-pin internal usb cable, an "a" type external usb cable, a card slot panel, a small baggie of screws, a driver cd (not pictured) and a manual (not pictured).

Obviously I wasnt going to destroy the beauty of my case by adding a white drive. Needless to say some painting was in order, I still had plenty of the paint left so there was no excuse not to make it match.

First came the disassembly. The pcb was held in by 2 plastic clips towards the back and plastic stand offs around the edges. All I had to do was unclip the 2 clips and it slid right out. Here are some pics of the casing and the pcb:

The top with the cf and memory stick slots as well as the activity led:

The bottom with the sd and smart media slots:

Then came taping in preparation for painting.
I could only find first aid tape so thats what I used:

Once taped it was ready for paint. Since this isnt an incredibly critical paint job I didnt see the need to sand and prime first.
My school likes to use extra smudgy ink for their newspaper and it shows:

About halfway dry:

While that was drying I opened up my case for the first time since I painted the drive bezels. For the life of the case, I've wiped the sides with a tissue (or just my hand) every few weeks to keep it somewhat dust free.
This is about 2 weeks worth of dust:

My original cable mis-management:

Not as dusty as I thought it would be:

The only other place where there was considerable dust was in my vid card's heatsink fins, which is understandable. Overall I'm impressed at how well this case keeps dust out, yet is pretty much open all around. After looking for about 30 min in every box I have, I couldnt find my can-o-compressed-air, so I had to use my lungs-o-compressed-air instead. After about 5 minutes of light-headedness, I determined it was the best I could get it.

Alright, moving on...
A quick look inside showed that I needed to move my hd's around to make room for the reader.
The top drive is right where the reader will go:

Another quick look showed that I needed to take the ram out so I could slide the top hd out, which meant I needed to unplug a bunch of cables and probably take out my vid card and sound card just to make things easier. So, I decided that I would just unplug everything and make it really easy, which led to me wanting to redo my cable management. I also thought I might as well drop the optical drives down a couple bays.
1GB (2x512MB) Corsair XMS PC3200 running at 2-3-3-5:

While I was unplugging everything and taking things out I didnt need, I was reminded of the horrible placement of the firewire headers on my mobo (Abit NF7-S v2).

Now on to figuring out how I would connect the card reader. I wanted both front usb ports that came with the case and I needed at least 3 in back and with only 2 headers and 2 usb ports on the i/o panel the only solution would be to modify the 9 pin header connector for the extra back usb ports. More specifically taking off the pins for one of the ports and putting the pins for the card reader in their place:

The original header:

The modified header:

I blocked out the disabled port to save confusion:

While I was doing that I decided to take off the cables for the headphone and mic port from the front header. I never used them and they were just cluttering up the case.
Before:

After:

Now it was time to put everything back together, but I found that one of the reasons my cable management was so bad before was because the round ide cables i had were incredibly stiff and the connections were flimsy. I decided it was time for them to go the way of a used tissue, but normal flat ide cables would be to restrictive too, so I would had to make my own round cables.
From this:

To this:

Both cables:

Once I finished the cables I remember why I took one of them off in the first place:

Easily fixed with some electrical tape (I found it about 10 min after I had sprayed the reader):

Fast forward to when the paint was dry...
Re-assembled:

Putting everything together was much easier since I used much better cable management. Heres some pics of it just before I closed it up:

The multitude of fan connectors on the right side:

I needed my 2 hands and a foot to get the back panel back on but it fits.
All together:

Close up:

Once this was all done I was able to figure out why the camera couldnt read the folders. Sure enough the folders had invalid names (like ".> 0 0 0. 0"). A visit to snapfiles and I was able to aquire a freeware program called PC Inspector File Recovery, which worked like a dream. It found all the files and allowed me to get the off the card. I also did some benchmarking using hd tach and got 3.4 MB/s burst and average. Not exactly the fastest card but it does the job.

The card reader works well, for cf cards at least. I havent had a chance to test it with anything else, but from my experience I would recommend to someone who just needs a basic internal card reader.

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed the novel.