My order of Yate Loons etc from, sadly a competitor (and why in the name of bob does OC not carry these things? Competitor says they do a lot of UK business... I'd far sooner not have to play import duty roulette. Most of the rest of the system was from OC. But I digress...)
...anyway, my 6 bright orange 120mm Yate Loons and one 80mm Nexus arrived this morning, and my Akasa Zen's now utterly full of horrendous lashuppery. Removed the spare PCI slot covers from the back of the case and taped my 80mm in there to extract, replaced the 2 OE Akasa fans (and hacked out the grill over the front one), taped another behind the vents in the side of the case over the GPU (why that vented section wasn't built up to 120x120 instead of what's about 120x90, I will never know, it's a natural place for an intake)...
Then stuck another 120mm into the spare big bays up top (which probably isn't achieving much) , and for my ultimate lashup finale a 5th taped between the edge of the drive bays and the hard drive, pointing at the processor, ram and northbridge. Ran all the fans apart from the main extractor and the one pointing at the board at 7V using a Zalman adaptor thing, the other 2 are taken off the mobo controller. <edit, tell a lie, they're at 7V using a cheapo splitter thing from OC)
This is never going to be a Custom PC feature build
But, my Pentium D 820 overclocked to 3.5ghz is now hitting just 49 degrees (according to Speedfan, on a DS3's internal sensors) where with the standard bits it was running up to 58, and making a horrendous racket at the same time. It's still not exactly stealthy, mind, the Akasa PSU is pretty noisy. But I'm pretty pleased considering that it's held together with electric tape.
Also discovered that the reason the zen's front USBs etc never worked was that the connector wasn't plugged in from the factory. Go Akasa, my decision to buy from you over Lian Li is once again proved ridiculous.
Perhaps I'll get some cold cathode tubes, the LEDs in the PSU are goign to die of loneliness. And a big window in the side so you can see the tape more clearly. I wonder how much further I can turn this thing up?
...anyway, my 6 bright orange 120mm Yate Loons and one 80mm Nexus arrived this morning, and my Akasa Zen's now utterly full of horrendous lashuppery. Removed the spare PCI slot covers from the back of the case and taped my 80mm in there to extract, replaced the 2 OE Akasa fans (and hacked out the grill over the front one), taped another behind the vents in the side of the case over the GPU (why that vented section wasn't built up to 120x120 instead of what's about 120x90, I will never know, it's a natural place for an intake)...
Then stuck another 120mm into the spare big bays up top (which probably isn't achieving much) , and for my ultimate lashup finale a 5th taped between the edge of the drive bays and the hard drive, pointing at the processor, ram and northbridge. Ran all the fans apart from the main extractor and the one pointing at the board at 7V using a Zalman adaptor thing, the other 2 are taken off the mobo controller. <edit, tell a lie, they're at 7V using a cheapo splitter thing from OC)
This is never going to be a Custom PC feature build
But, my Pentium D 820 overclocked to 3.5ghz is now hitting just 49 degrees (according to Speedfan, on a DS3's internal sensors) where with the standard bits it was running up to 58, and making a horrendous racket at the same time. It's still not exactly stealthy, mind, the Akasa PSU is pretty noisy. But I'm pretty pleased considering that it's held together with electric tape.Also discovered that the reason the zen's front USBs etc never worked was that the connector wasn't plugged in from the factory. Go Akasa, my decision to buy from you over Lian Li is once again proved ridiculous.
Perhaps I'll get some cold cathode tubes, the LEDs in the PSU are goign to die of loneliness. And a big window in the side so you can see the tape more clearly. I wonder how much further I can turn this thing up?
Last edited:
