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Just thought I'd share something from my past for shits and giggles.
Going through an old pic folder from an archive CD I made many years ago I found a pic I took of a PC I built for myself way back in late 1999 (edited the post to reflect a booboo in my timekeeping abilities). What makes this pic so unusual isn't the machine itself, a Athlon 750 box (another edit to get the specific CPU correct, sorry), or the case, just a plain old mid-ATX tower I got at a PC Club store here in Las Vegas, nor the IBM GXP60 "Deathstar" hard drive (lasted me two years without issues then it died a horrible click-of-death syndrome even SpinRite couldn't repair).
What made this box special to me was that, after putting it all together, and taking a look at it with the side panel removed, I came to the realization that it was simply horrible to look at. The wiring was shoddy, even by the standards of the day. 80 conductor IDE cables weren't even really around yet in quantity, so I had 40 conductor cables from the single hard drive and the single combo drive CD/DVD unit.
The power cables were the usual twisted nightmare of multicolored crap, the wiring harness entirely too frayed to be of any legitimate artistic value, and the front panel wiring was basically laying wherever it was inside the case at the time.
So I took it upon myself to clean up the box, so to speak. The intention was, as the topic states, to create a "Clean Box," and in those days I even spelled it [C]leanox (forum software thinks it's the code for bold text) because I'd just started hanging out here at Hard|OCP back in those days. I wanted to create something special, something that no one had seen before, so I started thinking about how to wire the box up and keep most everything hidden, or hide everything I possibly could.
I stopped using the CD audio cable and switched over to using the CD playback digitally from the SoundBlaster AWE64 card I had, so that got rid of the useless CD audio cable. I also did some research (using AltaVista since Google wasn't around yet) on cable folding, or slicing up 40 conductor cables and wrapping them into more tightly bundled sets, but decided against it for fear of ruining the ones I had. Didn't have a lot of spares at that time, and I was living and working in Death Valley, CA, at a hotel resort - I could only get into Vegas once, maybe twice a month on shopping trips.
I routed the CPU fan power cable around the base of the HSF itself once to take up the slack. What's not seen in the pic is how I routed the rear case fan wiring down in between the capacitors on the board to the connection point on the motherboard. On one trip into Pahrump I stopped at a Radio Shack distributor (not a real store, just a franchise that sold RS parts) and grabbed some wire looms for that nasty power cable harness to tame it.
I also took the front case fan power cable and spliced it to some more wiring to extend the length, and then wired it up inside the front space between the case front panel so it wouldn't be seen. I then took the front panel wiring and laid it flat against the case itself and laid it from fron to back, routing it underneath the motherboard so that only the very ends of the panel harness would be seen at the lower edge of the motherboard where the individual connections were made, as seen in the pic.
I put the power cable wiring inside the looms, cut them to fit, twisted the 4 pin power cables to relatively tight and thin packing styles and then set off to fold the IDE cables 4x over. Didn't get that far, however. The best I could do was a 2x foldover: once to halve the width, then again to quarter it. I then flattened them out using a book and let it sit for a while. I applied some Scotch tape at 3 inch intervals to keep the cables folded over tightly and neatly, and then bent then into position and attached everything.
Slapped a Matrox G400 in the box for video duties (I still miss that card, really), the aforementioned SoundBlaster AWE64, and a WinTV TV card together all mounted on an Asus A7V motherboard with a whopping 128MB of PC100 SD-RAM to give it room to breathe, and tossed in a lowly floppy drive to boot (no pun intended).
In the long run, I ended up with this...
Sorry about the image quality; it's a scan I made of the Polaroid I took back in November 1997 after finishing the project. Also, from the angle of this shot you can see most all of the wiring right there - but if you were able to move to the right just a bit, and look into the case from a perpendicular angle, straight in from the side, the only thing you'd see are the power harness looms and the grey of the folded IDE cables - the drive assembly actually provided "cover" for the front panel wiring strip all the way to the edge of the motherboard making it hidden from the direct side view.
Mind you, by today's standards most people would think, "Oh who gives a rat's ass," but again, this was done in 1999 (date edited), before anyone ever heard of Alienware, or VoodooPC, or any other boutique PC maker except Falcon NorthWest because they were the only company in business at the time serving the "personalized personal computer" building needs of enthusiasts.
That box was put together long before anyone gave a shit about proper wiring, or clean wiring, or simply making the inside of the machine "pretty" and organized, before people cared about airflow, before people cared more about the outside of the box than some people care about their own lives, etc. My how things have changed in the past 10 years or so.
I had a friend long ago that "knew someone" at Falcon NW and after seeing my [C]leanox, Falcon NW offered me a job - well, someone in the HR department did. I still have that email stored someplace, I'll have to pull it out again and get a giggle off it someday.
I would have loved to have dropped the job in Death Valley and ran to Falcon up in Oregon, but the job didn't include relocation expenses so I had to let it go. They make nice machines, really, they always have. But I can do better...
So, that's my trip down memory lane. I still build machines for some people on occasion, family, friends, etc. I had a guy that paid over $5000 recently for a relatively top of the line Alienware box, a nice setup in some respects, ridiculously overpriced as expected - but that's the same for every boutique maker across the board.
He got it home, set it up, had issues with it and called me instead of Alienware's tech support. I came over, fixed it in person (I know they can't do that, that's a given) and not only fixed it but made it much faster than it was from the factory because of some stuff they neglected to enable or tweak.
For $5000, I could have built him a more powerful machine, more RAM, more drivespace, better video card, better monitor, better RAM, etc... better everything, and pocketed the ~$1500 in savings as the fee for the job. Go figure...
He's a happy customer now - of mine, that is. He won't ever buy another boutique PC since he realized how much money he wasted choosing Alienware. I tease him about it occasionally, but I'm safe in the knowledge that if he decides to get me involved in building him his next machine, the actual Alienware box he owns now becomes a hand-me-down PC and it's already been promised to me.
Have fun, always...
Going through an old pic folder from an archive CD I made many years ago I found a pic I took of a PC I built for myself way back in late 1999 (edited the post to reflect a booboo in my timekeeping abilities). What makes this pic so unusual isn't the machine itself, a Athlon 750 box (another edit to get the specific CPU correct, sorry), or the case, just a plain old mid-ATX tower I got at a PC Club store here in Las Vegas, nor the IBM GXP60 "Deathstar" hard drive (lasted me two years without issues then it died a horrible click-of-death syndrome even SpinRite couldn't repair).
What made this box special to me was that, after putting it all together, and taking a look at it with the side panel removed, I came to the realization that it was simply horrible to look at. The wiring was shoddy, even by the standards of the day. 80 conductor IDE cables weren't even really around yet in quantity, so I had 40 conductor cables from the single hard drive and the single combo drive CD/DVD unit.
The power cables were the usual twisted nightmare of multicolored crap, the wiring harness entirely too frayed to be of any legitimate artistic value, and the front panel wiring was basically laying wherever it was inside the case at the time.
So I took it upon myself to clean up the box, so to speak. The intention was, as the topic states, to create a "Clean Box," and in those days I even spelled it [C]leanox (forum software thinks it's the code for bold text) because I'd just started hanging out here at Hard|OCP back in those days. I wanted to create something special, something that no one had seen before, so I started thinking about how to wire the box up and keep most everything hidden, or hide everything I possibly could.
I stopped using the CD audio cable and switched over to using the CD playback digitally from the SoundBlaster AWE64 card I had, so that got rid of the useless CD audio cable. I also did some research (using AltaVista since Google wasn't around yet) on cable folding, or slicing up 40 conductor cables and wrapping them into more tightly bundled sets, but decided against it for fear of ruining the ones I had. Didn't have a lot of spares at that time, and I was living and working in Death Valley, CA, at a hotel resort - I could only get into Vegas once, maybe twice a month on shopping trips.
I routed the CPU fan power cable around the base of the HSF itself once to take up the slack. What's not seen in the pic is how I routed the rear case fan wiring down in between the capacitors on the board to the connection point on the motherboard. On one trip into Pahrump I stopped at a Radio Shack distributor (not a real store, just a franchise that sold RS parts) and grabbed some wire looms for that nasty power cable harness to tame it.
I also took the front case fan power cable and spliced it to some more wiring to extend the length, and then wired it up inside the front space between the case front panel so it wouldn't be seen. I then took the front panel wiring and laid it flat against the case itself and laid it from fron to back, routing it underneath the motherboard so that only the very ends of the panel harness would be seen at the lower edge of the motherboard where the individual connections were made, as seen in the pic.
I put the power cable wiring inside the looms, cut them to fit, twisted the 4 pin power cables to relatively tight and thin packing styles and then set off to fold the IDE cables 4x over. Didn't get that far, however. The best I could do was a 2x foldover: once to halve the width, then again to quarter it. I then flattened them out using a book and let it sit for a while. I applied some Scotch tape at 3 inch intervals to keep the cables folded over tightly and neatly, and then bent then into position and attached everything.
Slapped a Matrox G400 in the box for video duties (I still miss that card, really), the aforementioned SoundBlaster AWE64, and a WinTV TV card together all mounted on an Asus A7V motherboard with a whopping 128MB of PC100 SD-RAM to give it room to breathe, and tossed in a lowly floppy drive to boot (no pun intended).
In the long run, I ended up with this...
Sorry about the image quality; it's a scan I made of the Polaroid I took back in November 1997 after finishing the project. Also, from the angle of this shot you can see most all of the wiring right there - but if you were able to move to the right just a bit, and look into the case from a perpendicular angle, straight in from the side, the only thing you'd see are the power harness looms and the grey of the folded IDE cables - the drive assembly actually provided "cover" for the front panel wiring strip all the way to the edge of the motherboard making it hidden from the direct side view.
Mind you, by today's standards most people would think, "Oh who gives a rat's ass," but again, this was done in 1999 (date edited), before anyone ever heard of Alienware, or VoodooPC, or any other boutique PC maker except Falcon NorthWest because they were the only company in business at the time serving the "personalized personal computer" building needs of enthusiasts.
That box was put together long before anyone gave a shit about proper wiring, or clean wiring, or simply making the inside of the machine "pretty" and organized, before people cared about airflow, before people cared more about the outside of the box than some people care about their own lives, etc. My how things have changed in the past 10 years or so.
I had a friend long ago that "knew someone" at Falcon NW and after seeing my [C]leanox, Falcon NW offered me a job - well, someone in the HR department did. I still have that email stored someplace, I'll have to pull it out again and get a giggle off it someday.
I would have loved to have dropped the job in Death Valley and ran to Falcon up in Oregon, but the job didn't include relocation expenses so I had to let it go. They make nice machines, really, they always have. But I can do better...
So, that's my trip down memory lane. I still build machines for some people on occasion, family, friends, etc. I had a guy that paid over $5000 recently for a relatively top of the line Alienware box, a nice setup in some respects, ridiculously overpriced as expected - but that's the same for every boutique maker across the board.
He got it home, set it up, had issues with it and called me instead of Alienware's tech support. I came over, fixed it in person (I know they can't do that, that's a given) and not only fixed it but made it much faster than it was from the factory because of some stuff they neglected to enable or tweak.
For $5000, I could have built him a more powerful machine, more RAM, more drivespace, better video card, better monitor, better RAM, etc... better everything, and pocketed the ~$1500 in savings as the fee for the job. Go figure...
He's a happy customer now - of mine, that is. He won't ever buy another boutique PC since he realized how much money he wasted choosing Alienware. I tease him about it occasionally, but I'm safe in the knowledge that if he decides to get me involved in building him his next machine, the actual Alienware box he owns now becomes a hand-me-down PC and it's already been promised to me.
Have fun, always...
