Bling my rig!

Quartz · 5 Dec 2015 at 18:07

Here's the innards of my PC

It's a little dark. I'd like to show off a little, and I thought I might do so with some LED strips, of which OCUK has a plentiful supply. My initial thought was a long green strip facing inwards

to go with the green GPUs, and to fit the strip on the inner upper lip, but the FT05 is so bad for cabling - neat cabling anyway - and the panels are padded for noise control (as you can see on the right) that I'm concerned about a good fit.

Or I could go purple to match my Ducky Shine keyboard.

The other thing is that my EVGA SLI bridge glows white. Can I change that?

Any thoughts?

Snookums · 5 Dec 2015 at 18:18

Is that passive cooler?

If i were you I'd go either purple LED's or white, white goes with everything no matter what colour scheme your build is and purple which match your peripherals.

I personally have white LED's in the RIG, red on my mouse and keyboard and the LED's on my cards, one is red the other is white.

I'm pretty sure you can't change the colour on your bridge either.

Quartz · 5 Dec 2015 at 22:52

Snookums said:
Is that passive cooler?

Yes, and the TXs being in high gear - and thus noisy - permanently (due to my three monitors) ****es me off.

Snookums · 5 Dec 2015 at 23:05

was gonna say surely having a passive CPU cooler is kinda of made redundant by the SLI TX's

Quartz · 5 Dec 2015 at 23:18

Snookums said:
was gonna say surely having a passive CPU cooler is kinda of made redundant by the SLI TX's

The idea is for the system to be silent in desktop mode, not gaming mode. With a single TX and two monitors it is almost - only the TX is audible - but with three monitors, the TX runs at near full speed all the time and is a RIGHT PAIN.

The PSU turns the fan off at low power usages and the case fans are fitted but off (saves them being stored elsewhere).

So white or purple LEDs, then. What do you think about the proposed location? Can you suggest a better one? The other obvious place, below the GPUs is obscured by the power cables.

Snookums · 5 Dec 2015 at 23:39

I'm guessing it has a window on the side panel?

Threepwood · 5 Dec 2015 at 23:48

That is actually pretty cool looking, with the passive cooler. The case itself looks like it has great air flow. How does it do at cooling when everything is full blast?

I would go with GREEN because I like the BORG feeling with black cases.

Bossman · 6 Dec 2015 at 14:17

If you intend on keeping the passive heatsink it would be a shame not to show it off with some kind of lighting in the middle.

Quartz · 6 Dec 2015 at 15:48

Threepwood said:
That is actually pretty cool looking, with the passive cooler. The case itself looks like it has great air flow. How does it do at cooling when everything is full blast?

It's amazing. Heat from each source rises independently rather than affecting the component above it. Note that I don't overclock.

I would go with GREEN because I like the BORG feeling with black cases.

That could indeed be cool.

Quartz · 6 Dec 2015 at 15:51

Bossman said:
If you intend on keeping the passive heatsink it would be a shame not to show it off with some kind of lighting in the middle.

Now that's an idea. Unfortunately it's one on which I'll likely pass: to get cabling round the back to the RHS of the motherboard I'd have to take out the motherboard. The FT05 is really bad for neat cabling.

almostgfx · 7 Dec 2015 at 18:35

I had colored LED's in my system once and it just drowns out the colour of your entire build so i went white and it just looks amazing now, brings everything out.

Go white!

Luggs · 8 Dec 2015 at 09:06

RGB would allow a different colour to suit your every mood

WhiteCobra · 8 Dec 2015 at 12:09

Quartz said:
The idea is for the system to be silent in desktop mode, not gaming mode. With a single TX and two monitors it is almost - only the TX is audible - but with three monitors, the TX runs at near full speed all the time and is a RIGHT PAIN.

The PSU turns the fan off at low power usages and the case fans are fitted but off (saves them being stored elsewhere).

So white or purple LEDs, then. What do you think about the proposed location? Can you suggest a better one? The other obvious place, below the GPUs is obscured by the power cables.

I also run a 3 monitor setup and use to suffer from the GPU not downclocking. Get yourself NvidiaInspector and within the App if you right click the "show overclocking" option there's something along the lines of "multi-screen power saver". From here you can force the GPU to enter 2d mode with 3 screens, and adjust at what point the GPU is allowed to clock up again.

Quartz · 8 Dec 2015 at 15:53

I've ordered the white and the purple strips. I couldn't decide which one so I got both!

And OCUK now do free delivery up here. Yay!

skaif · 8 Dec 2015 at 16:08

WhiteCobra said:
I also run a 3 monitor setup and use to suffer from the GPU not downclocking. Get yourself NvidiaInspector and within the App if you right click the "show overclocking" option there's something along the lines of "multi-screen power saver". From here you can force the GPU to enter 2d mode with 3 screens, and adjust at what point the GPU is allowed to clock up again.

^ This! I have set mine to clock down at <10% usage and it ramps up whenever I go over! Love it now, its so quiet...

Quartz said:
I've ordered the white and the purple strips. I couldn't decide which one so I got both!

And OCUK now do free delivery up here. Yay!

You any good at soldering? I'm not and I managed to get a cheap RGB kit off the bay and hack together an old molex with my basic soldering skills and voila:

theaterix · 8 Dec 2015 at 20:32

skaif said:
^ This! I have set mine to clock down at <10% usage and it ramps up whenever I go over! Love it now, its so quiet...

You any good at soldering? I'm not and I managed to get a cheap RGB kit off the bay and hack together an old molex with my basic soldering skills and voila:

Im guessing you got the LED strips with those 4 really thin pin connectors on?
Ive just gotten my LED strip from downstairs that i have had for ages, and originally tore my desk to bits when i took it off as the adhesive was garbage and it was way too long.
Want to put another strip on the back so i chopped off how much i needed and it works, but with me building my new rig, i fancy getting some LEDs to show the internals off!
Any tips on how you did it?

skaif · 9 Dec 2015 at 06:27

theaterix said:
Im guessing you got the LED strips with those 4 really thin pin connectors on?
Ive just gotten my LED strip from downstairs that i have had for ages, and originally tore my desk to bits when i took it off as the adhesive was garbage and it was way too long.
Want to put another strip on the back so i chopped off how much i needed and it works, but with me building my new rig, i fancy getting some LEDs to show the internals off!
Any tips on how you did it?

Sure!
If you want full RGB you're going to need the white controller box thing that comes with it, the one that has the IR sensor for the remote, kind of like this:

Now in that pic, the black wire has been cut and you can see the red 'live' and black 'ground' protruding. I just found an old molex fan adapter, chopped off the fan header and soldered it to the correct wires. That was it! Plugged it into the molex out of the PSU and it powers up and works just as good!

In my personal rig, I had some spare lighting strip left over but could not do RGB due to the controller being used in the other rig, however, as my colour scheme is red and black, I did the same thing!
Slightly differently this time, instead of soldering the live to red wire out of the controller, I soldered it to the the 12v part of the strip and with the ground I soldered it directly onto the strip where the 'r' (for red

) marking was.
In the pic below you can see where you can chop the strip at the connector and the '12v' and 'r' connectors that I soldered to. (I have the SMD 505 strip but the logic is the same for the other one)

Worked a treat

http://cdn.************.com/static/forever/images/userbuild/156858.ae7095cacbdcf5ff30e540c45ef48b73.a62087f648cf4a3ee88ce8b8c3751a3b.1600.jpg

Hope that helped!

Quartz · 11 Dec 2015 at 13:40

Pics to follow when my phone is charged, but I fitted the white strip and it looks great. Unfortunately I have somewhat blundered: I thought I'd ordered the white strip with magnetic backing but it appears I ordered it with the sticky-tape backing, so it's now a permanent fixture. I fitted it across the top and down the side.

But there's bad news: I fear OCUK are doomed. Yes, you guessed it, NO HARIBO!