Project: Cobalt

[guitarslingerchris]

This build is one of impulse I suppose. The hardware was doing perfectly fine in my modified Lian Li PC-65 but I have been wanting a Corsair 800D ever since I saw them. I bought one and well, this just happened.

Specs:
Corsair 800D
Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450
Asus P5Q Pro
2x2gb Corsair Dominator 1066mhz @ 5-5-5-15
(2) ATI 4870 512mb
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer
Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000w

150gb WD RaptorX
(2) 1tb WD Black
(4) 1tb WD Black RAID5 external box
(5) 1.5tb WD Green RAID5 external box

Swiftech Apogee GT
Swiftech MCW-30
Swiftech MCR320-QP
XSPC 5.25" Bay Res
PrimoChill LRT UV Blue 1/2" ID 3/4" OD Tubing


My current plan actually involves no serious modifications to the 800D which looks suspiciously like a penis in text form. The case supports a 3x120mm radiator stock which is fantastic and has a plethora of routing options for both wiring and tubing and really I won't need to cut a single thing to get everything I want out of this case.

What will require modification however, is the 5.25" bay res I plan to use. What I plan to do with it is mount it in the usual location in a 5.25" bay but I am going to make a faceplate for it to cover up most of the light as I'm no longer a fan of a big block of water in the front of cases.

Here is what I've come up with so far for the faceplate. I'm going to have this cut out of something, perhaps black vinyl or black plexi. This one is pretty simple, a clean font and an outline of Master Shake. It's a running joke for several years with friends of mine that I am just like Master Shake so it seemed appropriate. The white background would actually be black and the black would be cut out to show the water/reservoir behind.

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Well, I'm sure you'll all be happy to know that I completely skipped snapping pics of me just putting the computer together. Not any modding involved so I didn't feel the need. This case is absolutely phenomenal! The more I play with it the more I come to find little things that make my life easier.

That said, I did have a little bit of a hard time deciding where and how to mount the pump. I couldn't mount it in the 5.25" bays because I would have had to mount it directly to the bay reservoir which would mean it couldn't slide out to be filled which would pose a problem. In the end I put the pump roughly where the designers had in mind although I got a little creative with it. You can also see my trusty old Enermax 600w beast there. He's getting replaced with a brand new Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000w as soon as my MDPC-X sleeving gets here from Germany and I get it all resleeved

Here you can see the majority of the loop. Lots of extra tubing there to reach to and from the pump but it is worth it 100 times over having the pump under the reservoir when it comes time to fill and bleed the system.

Here's a pulled back shot, I really loathe both the lighting in this house and my apathy towards learning how to actually use this Nikon D70 to take really good looking pics. You can barely see the bottom of the Swiftech MCR320-QP radiator at the top.

Other than the case, there wasn't much to this upgrade so far. A bigger radiator is probably not usually the upgrade that it was here, but it makes all the difference in the world with this machine. The 120mm single radiator I was using before just couldn't quite handle the output of the Q6600 and QX6700 I had previously when overclocked. The combination of moving to a 45nm Q9450 and tripling the cooling capacity has given me worlds of headroom.

What's left then?

1. Lighting! I still have to install some UV Cathodes to make my tubes glow and install the LED for the bay reservoir. Whether or not the water gets dye or coolant remains to be seen.

2. Faceplates! Not only do I need to get the faceplate for the bay reservoir finalized and cut, but I also have to decide how I'm going to stealth the DVD drive into the front of the case. I'm seriously considering cutting a slot in a faceplate and getting a slot load drive, we will see.

3. Sleeving! My new Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000w modular power supply is here but unfortunately the mass amounts of sleeving are not! Once that arrives I will get to work MurderMod style on all of the wiring in this case and that will hopefully give it a much more polished look.

I bought a good deal of both of these, I'm thinking Black for the Ground wires and Grand Bleu for everything else, all done with black heatshrink.

 

[guitarslingerchris]

I just got a package from LuftPost/Deutsche Post with a nice bit of artwork on it

My entire order, not cheap but very worth it.

Sample of the SATA sleeving and his new Orange color.

My personalized Pin Extractor

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Woke up today dreading what I was to do, but it ended up not being quite as bad as I expected. Nonetheless, it still took me just under 3 hours to complete the work you see below.

Beginning to dismantle my new Enermax Galaxy DXX 1000w

I will have to work on the fan grills a little later so they match the theme

The very first wire down!

Starting to see some variation here...

Halfway done... with just the 24-pin connector. This took me about an hour and fifteen minutes to get this far.

The finished product!

More sleeve pr0n

I am very excited to be this far already and cannot wait for the whole thing to be done. I don't think I will sleeve all of the modular cables that came with this PSU as there are A LOT!


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Almost done sleeving this sucker! It's been a task and a half and my fingers are about to fall off, but I think it looks great.

I ended up having to sleeve one modular cable here, a 6-pin PCI-e power cable so I can run both 4870s in this machine. Picked up my second one for $80 thanks to a friend from my local LAN

Here's the PSU as it sits now, four wires short of completion. I took a Dremel to the casing to give the wires extra room but it is still going to be a very tight fit.

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Just got a rough draft render of what the faceplate for the bay reservoir will look like and it is AWESOME!

Here's the case back on the power supply, this was WAY more than difficult to get back on with all of the extra girth from the sleeving. It was a 2 person job, and I don't say that lightly.

Fan grill freshly painted and baked. Yes, I put that sucker in the oven to speed up the process a bit as I was running short on time.

Here I just realized that the power supply will not physically fit in the case if I don't move the pump further towards the front AND split the wires on either side of the tubing. This sucker is BIG.

A shot of the 24-pin connector in all of it's glory.

Here you can see the mass of wiring going on either side of the OUT tube of the pump.

The backside of the system. Wire management was alot easier than I expected it to be when it looked like this. But about 30 zip ties later it looked good in the front and the side panel fit on too.

Seems like a contradiction to put this much effort into the sleeving when this case is designed specifically to hide wiring, but I still love it.

The 24-pin and four 6-pin connectors all neatly arranged with all of the wires in the correct order, neat and tidy

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Went to UCO last night and played with the CNC mill and some of the other heavy duty toys for a bit. We broke the 1/16" bit we needed for making the faceplate so we made a 180% size test piece out of scrap lucite

Front shot of the case with the protective plastic removed and somewhat close color representation.

Side shot showcasing all of the dust that is attracted to this side panel like the plague.
I find it pretty interesting how much brighter those blue tubes are with the UV cathodes on in conjunction with the white.

Unfortunately for the moment the faceplate plan is stalled. I no longer have access to a CNC mill locally so I will have to go back to my original plan of black vinyl or foil unless I get lucky.

 

[guitarslingerchris]

Moar pics! Changed the lighting, added some blue and removed some white. In progress of making a controller for the fans and the lights so it can be controlled on the fly via software, should be pretty awesome. I am hoping there will be room to put the white cathodes back in there since all of the lighting will be dimmable with the new controller and I can make exactly the look I want


You might notice there is no RAM in there

Here you can see the stark difference in glow where the UV light stops since there's no UV filter on the camera. Added another UV CCFL after this pic to try and remedy that. Also notice that the 4870s have come out for the time being to make room for my 5870 until Subtlety is back together.

I just talked to my friend and he sent me a video of the controller in action. This is a smaller scale one for a test while we wait for Mouser to deliver the parts for the real one

CCFL Software Dimming control

 

[FrEaKy]

Awesome startup on the build bro, I like it.

 

[gwarren007]

Nice!!

 

[DraganUS]

Awesome looking system man. Love the sleeving on that PSU. Have it, and was looking into sleeving mine too. Something in like white/blue from mdpc.

 

[guitarslingerchris]

Thanks for the compliments guys, I appreciate it. I'm having a lot of fun with this build, I really haven't been this excited about a case in awhile.

Awesome looking system man. Love the sleeving on that PSU. Have it, and was looking into sleeving mine too. Something in like white/blue from mdpc.

I am actually getting ready to start back work on my other case, Project: Subtlety, and will be doing white and black in the same style I did here. As a matter of fact, I got this package in the mail today

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Took a trip to Absolute Signs & Graphics today to have a chat with Reggie up there and see about getting a faceplate cover made out of vinyl. Didn't take very long at all and we had a test piece to see how closely it would cut to my design and it looked great!

Now this piece isn't usable on the faceplate itself, but I'm sure I'll manage to stick it somewhere.

Here you can see the difference in the black vinyl to the brushed anodized aluminum. Really doesn't look too out of place.

Unfortunately the installation didn't exactly go as planned since we didn't have the right tools so I'm getting some more cut tomorrow to redo it.

Sexy side shot of the case as it stands now, desperately needing the attention of an air compressor.

Even sexier night shot of the case. Doesn't show up well in the picture, but the light leaks from the sides and top of the reservoir. Part of that will be fixed by pulling the reservoir further back into the case so it is again flush with the front, and we're also going to extend the edges of the vinyl by 1/4" so we can wrap it to completely eliminate the light bleed.

 

[guitarslingerchris]

Got alot done tonight, but only got pics of the less substantial portion. I got the vinyl cut again and after another slightly more successful try, the third one was by far the best and we stuck with it.

Here is the case with my PC Modding model.

Moar pix! You can see that there is now zero light bleeding on the edges

Parts from Mouser also arrived and work has begun on the custom CCFL/Fan/LED software controller but it will not be finished until tomorrow.

 

[guitarslingerchris]

Well, the lighting is mostly done with the case now. Missing a 4" UV and a 4" blue cathode but that's just an issue of velcro and sleeving. Got the controller box complete and installed and the software is in a state where it does most anything I want at the moment, and anything more is just a reprogram away.


Here's a breadboard from the initial mock up of the test. We call this Squid v1.0.

Here's the perf board beginning to take shape. Surface mount LEDs for diagnostics on each channel, 6 for CCFLs, 2 for fans and 2 for LEDs. There are actually 8 fan headers though, split into two channels and 4 LED headers in two channels for 5v or 12v operation.

Bottom perf board nearly complete. We thought it was complete but ended up adding a 5v regulator while at the Intel LAN Fest Dallas.

Top perf board and the connector that makes it one with the bottom. Cutting into it this way we were able to add more headers for connections and still fit it into the project box.

There was alot of soldering on this project.

A LOT!

Putting the box together, it's black anodized aluminum with plastic ends.

Here is the box installed in the case. It's a good thing there is a large amount of room on the backside of this case or it wouldn't have had a chance.

Here is the controller software. It sends commands via Serial to the box through a C# GUI. Right now pretty much everything is fed to it via XML so it's not being constantly recompiled when it's worked on. Also it has a bitchin' icon!

I'll hopefully get some video of the controller in action soon so you can see what it's capable of. Right now when the PC turns on, the Fans go to 100%, each LED channel fades up to 100% and each of the 6 individual CCFL channels fades up to 100% one at a time and then reverts to the default color scheme I set: 100% UV/60% White/100% Blue to give it a nice glow while still keeping clear view of the sleeving.

I would be lying if I said I wasn't proud of this little box and I hope to improve on it for the Subtlety build when it resumes. Hope to hear some feedback on this!


EDIT: Took some rough video of the manual fading and a couple of timed animations we put together. The flickering you see in the video isn't visible with your eyes, it's the same as seeing scan lines on a CRT while it refreshes on video.

I just ran them all through Handbrake so I think the biggest file is 14.3mb. GO GO WATCH!

http://guitarslingerchris.com/video/CCFL/Manual Control.mp4

http://guitarslingerchris.com/video/CCFL/ANI1.mp4

http://guitarslingerchris.com/video/CCFL/TEST.mp4