Project Dianoga

arc@css said:
Utterly superb. :cool:

Love the colours. :)
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Thank you :)

It's absolutely amazing how far things have come when it comes to coverings and finishes. I mean if I said a couple of years ago that I was going to do a project in piano glass finish lime green and candy apple metallic green you would be talking a grand from a professional painter. Now? £15 worth of acrylic and the vinyl was less than £4 for 750mm x 300mm. Just checked, it was £3.29. I have used two sheets as part of the first one was creased and damaged (and was replaced) and I have made a good few mistakes and thrown more away than I have used but yeah, incredible that the parts would have cost me under £20.

I'm taking next week off as I am busy but will pick it back up again the following week. The only big thing left to do now is the motherboard and like the network card and GPU etc I have some pretty decent ideas.

Talking of the motherboard. This is one of, if not *the* best AM2+ boards Asus made. It has 8+2 VRMs IIRC (enough to overclock the original Phenoms, hot and power hungry) and is built like a tank. It has gorgeous copper heatsinks and what did they do? well some one at Asus decided that it was a good idea to make the board in black and blue. And yellow and red and white and a different blue for the audio header.



Seriously, what were they thinking? I guess that was right around the time where board manus were adding a splash of colour to boards and breaking them away from the old green and white, but sheesh man that designer clearly needed firing.

So the next part (and it's complicated because I do not want to use any of the blue slots) is to basically use the middle black slot for the GPU and then the bottom black slot for the network card. Once they are fitted the idea is to cover up pretty much everything else (hence why I bought that huge ram cooler).
 
Cenedd said:
Colours worked out really well for an Nvidia card!

I was going to say the board colours are from the era when they started colour coding so they could say PCI cards in the white slots and PCI-E in the blue...but some are black so they wrecked that theory. I'm gonna go with the designer was just colour-blind! :D
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The ram slots obviously come from that really popular 775 board. P5K? something like that. They obviously had them lying around lmao. The rest? god knows.

I fully expected the black slots to be X8 but you're right, they've ruined that theory because clearly stamped on the ends are PCIE 16 2 etc. IIRC with this board you can actually go into bios and distribute the lanes as you see fit.

Gigabyte used to do it too. Lovely blue boards with baby blue and white. And orange and yellow ETC.
 
Time to start sorting out the PSU. I cut the Cougar parts yesterday before having a nap. So this morning I got out the lime green gloss vinyl and finished cutting them.



And finished.



It's not a bad match with the acrylic either. Tiny bit darker, but you won't see it any way given it will be behind the shroud I made.



The PSU.



Pah !



And it's open. Wasn't terribly happy that they had glued the fan plug to the socket though FFS.



And



The badge fought me at first but was no match for the heat gun (from behind) and the Isoprop.



Some of you may remember one of my side mods when I was building the Triad rig. It was a paint booth, handy that !



It will turn to flat when it dries.

 
The power supply is done.



Apologies for the slightly gritty photos, it's still quite early and the sun seems to be hiding.
 
Cenedd said:
Much more in-keeping with the scheme. Impressed you got the badge off in a reusable state!
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You just don't see the hex mesh shaped burns on my finger tips :D

Heat gun man, always heat gun. It's a bit of a hot potato from there but as long as you don't drop it very far it usually works every time :D
 
The res can take two pumps so there are a couple of ports blanked off on that. I was thinking of making a hidden drain port if I can find a suitable place for it.
 
Cenedd said:
Although isn't your res at the top of the case? Not to say you couldn't invert the whole case and then drain it....if ya HAD to! :D
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I was thinking of fitting some hose to a fitting then putting a drain port at the bottom of the case. Maybe in the right panel. I could then undo the plug and let it drain before connecting a cheap barb fitting and some hose into one of those £3 pumps and could then pump the rest out.

I also need to drop you an email with some basic questions. Is that OK?
 
Cenedd said:
No problem....as long as they're modding/watercooling related...not so good at say fashion advice ;)
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Aww I wanted your opinions on the flairs I just got :D

Got some mental news this morning. I've been so busy working on Elvis that I didn't notice that -

1. I had been nominated for Custom PC mod of the month for the Triad.

2. Had actually won Custom PC mod of the month :eek:
 
Thanks. It had been one of my ambitions to feature. Winning ? LOL.

Funny thing is I had absolutely no idea until I received a pm this morning about the prizes.

I usually follow MOTM very closely so I can vote for Alex (Maki Role) but yeah, literally work, update logs,sleep.

So happy.
 
LePhuronn said:
WTFFFFFFFFF? Now THAT is some news to come out of the blue!

Many congratulations
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It's been an ambition of mine to be nominated for years. Sadly I don't have thousands of pounds so I usually read with interest and vote for legends like Alex (Maki Role) and Dan (B-Negs)

At first I was like "oh wow I've been nominated" then after two coffees I realised I'd actually been nominated over a month ago and had then won. Madness man just madness. There are prizes too !

I think I've won four of those new Corsair ML fans in my choice of LED colour.

I need a NAS and due to the very low price of 3mm sheet acrylic I think I'm going to to either do an ITX complete scratch build or hopefully something smaller like a Rasp Pi.

The fans can go in that.
 
Thanks Lewis and LePhuronn. It's been a great day. Just this minute got home from a wonderful holiday.

Some stuff arrived in my absence and there wasn't a single red card :D that's handy, saves me 75p per item to get them delivered to the PO.

Going to take the weekend off (yeah, I always say that lol). I thought about it whilst I was away and I can not make the covers for the motherboard until I get the cooler off of the GPU and fit the block. So I really sorta need the block now but I have loads to do still tbh. The other night I experimented with cutting the LEDs as they are not marked for cutting but it turns out they have a continuous + and - running up the spine so it worked well. They were slightly too long to fit under the motherboard and I was worrying about cutting them.
 
Thanks guys you rawk !

Normally I spend a large chunk of the day just reading build logs and catching up on forums etc. Since starting Elvis though I just haven't had time, so I've just been building. That's why I missed it lol.

Any way today (once the postie has been) is going to be lighting day. I am going to try and get most of the lighting ready to be fitted today (so braiding, extending wires, fitting connectors etc).

Will hopefully get the Killer NIC lighting up today :) Which reminds me, I must finish the light bleed cover thing.
 
So for today it was lighting. Mostly LEDs and mostly stripping soldering and shrinking etc. I also had to cut down four of the strips so they would fit under the motherboard.



Get out the extra wire and soldering stuff.



The first of many.



Triple LED cluster for the back of the bay res.



Almost there now...



OK so time to connect it all up to the test PSU.



I invited some friends over for the test.



And threw the switch....





High Five !



Time to sort out the network card.



A short while later.





And the vents that look super cool when it's dark.



So everything works great. This is my "completed cable" box. It's growing ever fuller.



This also came today.



This one's for you buddy.
 
Cheers. Gotta say I wasn't really feeling it today (but then being honest I don't really feel braiding or soldering any day lol).

I would say that about 90% of the wiring is all done now. I need to get a 4 pin fan extension though so I can actually plug the pump in, but most of it is finished.

I just bought a few small bits and pieces from the bay where the fleas live.



I got those to replace the old ones that are on the res and rad. This stuff here is for the 3 5.25 bays which of course are now blocked.



I will do something with that no doubt. I got this for the SSD that will be on display.



And I got these.



Not for my multimeter though. I am going to cut off the MM connectors and fit male PCIE pins to them. That way I can access more voltages from the test PSU and poke things like LEDs etc. So for example if I need to test something with 3v I just push the pins into the corresponding pins on the 24 pin socket and bingo, I have 3v and ground to poke an LED with. Or 5v, 12v etc.
 
LePhuronn said:
Looking good.

You're doing underlit motherboard? Sweet. I'm doing under lighting with an acrylic light panel so I can get a 3mm edge around the mobo too.

Looking forward to how yours turns out!
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Thanks. Yes I'm going to fit them under the board. I had a board called a Gigabyte Phoenix a while back with orange LEDs under the board and it looked great. I like coloured LEDs better than white ones to look at. White look better in photos but I love proper coloured lights.

There will be four hidden under the board, one hidden under the radiator and one hidden under the shroud. Then of course numerous single LEDs etc. But in all cases I do not want to be looking directly at the LED strips. They're pretty ugly tbh.

That's why where I can I use cathodes because they provide a more even light. Mind you, they're quite hard to get hold of now and quite expensive.
 
Cenedd said:
You want to try Plasma Rods; they're immorally priced and only available from the US. Roll on import duty as a slap in the face! Wanted one to make a high-level brake light for my car that doesn't block out the entire screen.
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Plasma = Nerdgasm. Have you seen that Raiden memory? OMFG. DO WANT.
 
Yay :D



Took the barbs out.



And fitted mine :)



GPU



Cooler off



Cleaned the core.



And fitted.



Those memory sinks just about fit :)



And done :)

 
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