You are doing a great job.
You could even do a window on the rear side with the pump
Liking the colourtheme.
Neat idea!
It won't happen at this time but maybe when I revisit this build later to fix a thing or two.
I promised you an update and here it is.
First of all, the goodies that arrived today. Dogmeat is once again happy since there was a little baggie of goodies in the box:
I've been looking for a good solution to monitor water temps through software and was just about to start building my own using an Arduino or Raspberry Pi when I was recommended to get an Aquaero XT instead. Said and done, that's what I did.
I might end up making my own fan controller / temp monitor down the line, but this works for me at the moment.
Remember the SLI bridge and the red plexiglass?
The plexi is now removed:
There's a few things to take note of here. The sheet of plexi is not very big and it's just wedged underneath the top and bottom edges around the logo. Also they've seemed to use some sort of glue or adhesive tape on it as well.
Second of all, the outer layer of metal(the brushed aluminum) is really, really, really thin.
Now, if anyone reads this and want to replicate this... What I did was that I brought out my trusty heatgun and heated the plexi so I could cut through it(see previous image).
Totally unnecessary!
What you should do is simply heat up the plexi until it becomes very pliable and then just push it out of the top and bottom edges. I used a tiny screwdriver and pushed through the logo(on the frontside) just to get the plexi to lift a little, then I used the hole I had drilled previously to use as an anchor point for when I pulled the plexi out of there.
I do not recommend pushing through the logo like I did because the risk of bending or even snapping the metal right off is quite great. Better to have an anchor point so you can pull the plexi out instead.
Oh, and as I mentioned. DO NOT cut the plexi, it serves no purpose and if you're careless you might even cut through the brushed aluminum piece(see previous images and the marks I made into it by cutting).
With that done it was time to change that color. My idea all along had been to use some lighting filters that are used for spotlights(professionally) or camera flashes. My brother who's working in that field hooked me up with some samples. This is just half of them I think:
Over 150 different colors, hues and transparancies. You can easily buy something similar on eBay for pennies.
Sorted through them and selected a few purples that most closely resembled the tubing in color. Not knowing how the LED light would change the color I thought it would be good to have a few different ones at the ready:
All cut(with a razor) and installed, easy peasy:
One of the good things about this Asus ROG SLI Bridge is that it comes with a power cable in case your GPU's can't light the led by themselves. So that made it easy to test the color and see if it was right without installing the SLI Bridge and powering up the computer.
Excitement!
Fail.
Turns out the LED is
also red. Not only the plexi but the actual LED too. Not at all what I expected. But since I had all those different colored filters I figured I could just use a blue one instead since blue + red = purple.
So I cut out a piece and installed it and tried again:
Fail.
Now the light of the LED barely shone through and there was some bleeding at the edges where the red shone through.
I tried all sorts of different combinations of blues and layers of blue. Here's a couple more.
I finally got so fed up with cutting out pieces of the filters that I simply plugged in the LED and put the filters on top just to see what it might look like. Nothing looked good.
If I got a good purple hue then the light was too dimmed. If the light was good then the hue was bad. Nothing worked.
This is the last one I did today. I might keep it, I might change it. It depends on my mood in the coming days:
I also promised a while ago to show you my custom cables and some of the pitfalls you can quite easily fall into.
Here they are, all done, far from perfect and in some cases absolutely messy:
The 24-pin "looks" good, but only because I've made two bends on the cables. There is still quite a bit of gap in between the wires but if I only had done one bend it would be way worse:
This is the 4-pin 12VATX cable. This one illustrates this problem even more. With just one bend the gap between the wires is humongous:
With two bends it's decent, but far from great:
So what is the reason for this?
Wire length. Basically you have to adjust your wire length depending on how you are going to bend the finished cable. The wires on the outside of the bend needs to be longer than the inner ones, if not then you get this sort of issue.
There are two factors to wire length, the wire itself
and the crimp. If you strip the wires unevenly you might place the crimp at a different spot on each wire which will affect the overall length of your wires.
Moving on... This is the 8-pin 12VATX cable:
Once again we have the wire length issue, but not quite as severe since I started paying attention to this at this point. But do you notice the twisting of the connectors/wires?
This, again, has two causes(from what I can tell) and the obvious one is that the crimps at either end of the wire aren't aligned. There is some leeway with this alignment but the more one of them are twisted compared to the other, the more twisting of the wires/connectors you get.
The second cause is the sleeving itself. If you have different amounts of slack on the sleeving you get different amounts of tension on the wires which will cause them to twist.
I really did not think that this would be such a major issue but it sort of is. The amount of slack I have on the sleeving varies a lot between individual wires.
These are my GPU cables, with basically all of the above issues exemplified:
But it's not all bad because if you just think about it a little when you are assembling the cables and if you use good cable combs you can make the "problems" appear at only one end of the cables. In my case the cable ends above will not be visible since they'll be at the PSU end, hidden behind the motherboard tray/wall.
This is what will be visible, and it looks sort of neat, even though the cable training isn't quite done yet:
