Be Excellent To Each Other

JC, talk me through what those parts you made are for. Are they for hiding stuff? Do they fit over things? That last one gives off a GFX type vibe to me.

Anyone want one of those IcyBox things that JC pointed me towards? Got one for my new laptop to replace the DVD drive with an SSD, but HP apparently don't use standard sizes or anything so the faceplates and hooks don't fit.

£17.50.

Some of them are cover panels yes. I did some work on the rig when I first got it (like blue cables etc) but nothing major. I decided a couple of months back after being inspired by a friend of mine to convert the inside so it looks like an alien space ship. The glyphs you see are from Alienware's actual font that they use, and they all decode into messages

You can see here what some of the pieces are.



Some make up a box that sits in the bottom others are just covers. The PSU will be completely boxed in, as will all of the wiring coming out of the PSU. I've done a shit load of work to the rig but I didn't think any one here would be terribly interested so I've not really posted much about it, but this is how it looks ATM (in progress obviously)



I'm in the "black out" phase. I have modded all of the add in cards (sound graphics etc) and painted all of the edges of them black so they don't stick out. I've also made plates for each card, fitted some hose seperators for nitrous systems etc.

This piece here is the floor (look back at the first pic)



Which has two cathodes fitted pushing light through a 3mm strip.

This thing here.



That's a nose cone I made using what modders call "the ghetto lathe". IE - a drill.



OK, so it goes 5mm black acrylic sheet - 5mm smoked acrylic sheet - 5mm black acrylic sheet - 5mm smoked acrylic sheet - 3mm black acrylic sheet. Then you shape it with alu sandpaper and then polish it. I added laquer when it was finished.



The cap of it was made from the centre of a fan, using the same method.



LEDS !



It goes here, on the front bottom intake panel (centre of the fan)

The front intake panel is now complete.



Just waiting for the glue to dry, it should be good tomorrow. Then I soldered the loom onto the switches. This loom provides two +/- 5v for the LEDs in the switches, as well as 12v switched (for the cathodes) and 5v switched (for the SSD UFO and nose cone).



I've promised myself a new XXL mouse mat and wrist rest but only when the build is complete. Here it is all lit up.



And all working as it should

I have decided I want custom GPU cables made up with a 14 pin comb x4. So they should be in some time next week, then I can press on and build it all

Why on Earth do your photos have that RISE OF THE TRIAD stamp on them?

Because that is the name of the project I've used on PC modding forums.

Alienware call this chassis the triad, so I thought it was fitting to name it that.

Ah! All I knew was that it's the name of some ancient PC game.

Yeah that's where I got the name idea from

JC: I admire the effort you put into modding your PCs, and (although it's not always to my taste) it looks like the work is well done with a good finish.

But - whats up with that pink and blue keyboard?

hahaha It's my 60% mech board with blue switches so I can change the keys really quickly. I have a couple of keysets for it, this one is called "Miami" and is a throw back to the 80s. Not for every one, but reminds me of the first time I ever got some pink,yellow and orange luminous socks for Christmas They come with a key puller that literally clips down and then you yank them off. I can do a full change in about two minutes.

I dunno, in a sea of black I guess this makes me smile. No doubt I will get bored of it but instead of changing out the board itself (which I love for its size and so on) I can just get new key caps

I've just ordered the last two cables I need, then I can begin assembly. I decided at the last minute to buy some black and blue PCIE power cables with captive combs to keep them tidier.

Video plz.

Next time I do a swap I will record it

Next time I do a swap I will record it

Next time I do a swap I will record it

Ffs

is that funky keyboard jammed?

Nah dodgy 3G signal. I'm out ATM

Gah, one of my case fans has passed onto the next world (the 120mm exhaust fan). I thought I'd noticed the CPU and GPU fans being a bit noisier than usual the last couple of days (and even the power supply fan, which is normally inaudible), but it was only when I was down on the floor for something else that I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the fan wasn't spinning at all.

(The CPU and GPU fans, of course, will spin up faster depending on the temperature of the components they're charged with cooling, and without an operational exhaust fan the whole inside of the PC will have been getting a lot hotter. And I guess the power supply fan was having to speed up as the PSU was now acting as a proxy exhaust and pulling in the additional heat from inside the case which then needed dispersing.)

Can't complain really, it's one of the case's original fans, and the case is over 11 years old.

In fact, sums wise it's (at least) 4015 days old, and let's say conservatively that it's done 7 hours per day, that fan has lasted 28100 hours of operation, which isn't too bad.

I've now done a clean-up job on all the fans in the case and the exhaust fan has sort of come back to life a little bit, but it's not kicking much out in the way of RPM and isn't exhausting much hot air - so it clearly needs to be replaced.

In fact, come to think about it, I can cannibalise a fan out of the other identical case I have in the house, which contains my now-deceased Windows XP PC, that's got a couple of reasonable 120mm fans in it. (They are however distinctly louder than the fans in my case, as the ones in my case were an upgrade from the standard case fans.)

I'll buy a new PC. At some point. Eventually.

I started out today with the rig moved around so I could work on it easily.



After some jiggling I realised that the SATA cables Tom sent me (hail the Tom) were not long enough to loop around and then go to the SSD floor. It was OK though, as thankfully I had a couple of joiners left kicking around from an old project.



I then fitted the SATA port cover.



And finally completely built the SSD panel.



And fitted it.



Then I started to wire up the side panel but catastrophe hit and the positive wire for the nose cone snapped off so it was out with the soldering tools ! the nose cone also decided it wanted to fall off too.



Then I fitted the main floor and glued the nose cone to the fan.



Then I fitted the radiator covers.



And then the back side PSU cover.



Then I powered the rig on.



And pressed in the two buttons whilst holding my breath...



And tidied everything up.



Then tested the lights again.



Wicked, nice and subtle ! let's take a peek in the rig..



And a rig pic.



So all I have left to do now is fit the new PCIE extensions, fit the mobo cooling cover (for the top fets) and well, that's really about it. Hard to believe that in one more hour or so of modding this will be all done !

Awesome job JC, been really interesting watching this build come together

Thanks

For the GPU I have ordered custom made cables with captive combs. The combs are those plastic things that separate each wire. Basically I have ordered this



And this



Only instead of being in two lumps they will be in one 14 hole comb X 4. So four combs going down the cable. As soon as I hook those up and fit the motherboard cooler cover (top of the board, nasty bare alu heatsink) it will be finished and I can start my next project lol.

If a 980Ti existed that would fit in my case I could be tempted to take a punt on one at around £300, but 27cm is absolutely the longest card that will go in - (as I found out with my old GTX480, which required me to push the hard drive cage back a few millimetres with some considerable force to squeeze the card in) - and there aren't any 980Tis that short.

Certainly in GTAV multiplayer my 970 is absolutely maxed out and bobbing around the thermal limits all the time even with the fan let loose at top whack, whereas the CPU still has some room for manoeuvre.

Again you leave me confused. A half decent case can be had for £40 these days.

You need to stop buying Mercs mate

It's not the cash that bothers me, it's the amount of knobbing about required to transplant a PC from one case to another. Yeah I know realistically it's just half a day's effort but I still can't be bothered because my PC is pretty close to end of life now anyway.

I dunno, maybe it's a possibility, I'll be taking a week off once the schools go back so maybe that'd be something to set a day aside for.

Whilst you are at it throw in a X5650 or X5670.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Xeon-Pr ... SwIgNXrPfI

Hex cored and lower die size than your existing chip so should do 4ghz easy. Would make a nice upgrade over what you have now, and give you a bit longer to make up your mind

Not only JC has superior modding skills, I've been doing a bit of EXTREME PC CUSTOMISATION myself this evening.

Following on from my exhaust fan failing the other day, I suspect the main culprit is the side intake fan on the windowed side of my PC, which doesn't have a dust filter on it, and has pulled in a fair whack of dust over the years onto the CPU fan and rear exhaust fan. (The front intake does have a dust filter behind it already.)

One masterful mod later, and the side intake now has a dust filter too.

If anyone wants step-by-step instructions or a pictorial guide as to how I achieved this, I'll be happy to help.

Very neat work

Needs more LEDs.

Is that parcel tape? hard core man, hard core

Can you take pictures from a few more angles please Hearthly. Also, you should probably watermark or put some form of identifier on your pics so that no one else can misappropriate your work.

Brilliant!

Ooohhh a half-length GTX1070, doesn't seem to have gimped clocks or anything either. (It's actually clocked a bit higher than the Founder's Edition.)

As there's no such thing as a half-length 980Ti, and the prices don't seem to be going below £350 anyway now, maybe this 1070 could give my PC a final shot in the arm to keep going for a while longer.

GTX980Ti performance in a half-length card, that's quite something.

At work the thinking on GPU is changing again and we are moving back to PC's with 4 gaming cards in them again.

We dug out some of the Fire Strike testing, in 2013 we had a score of 20539 for a rig with 4 Titans in it

Today the score is 20505 with one ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080. Its overclocked, score without this is 19840.

Insane performance increase in 3 years and the 1080 uses a fraction of the power as well

Not really PC gaming hardware but not sure where else it'd fit and it's not worth its own thread.

So then, yes, inkjet cartridges, they're bastard expensive things, we all know that already. Our printer since 2009 has been the excellent Canon MP-640, it's one of those all-in-one jobbies, every computer in the house can print to it, scan from it etc, the Canon software itself is pretty good, the drivers are solid, you can whack a USB key into the front of it etc.

It takes five cartridges in the form of the three normal colours and two different blacks which it chooses between depending on what it's doing or something. Either way it all seems to work fine and generally speaking the cartridges all run out around the same time.

On average we've been getting through two full sets of cartridges per year, the prices of which have remained somewhat consistent, at around £70-£75 for two genuine Canon sets of five cartridges. (They're a bit cheaper if you buy them in twin-packs hence the doubling up, and only one delivery charge.) Expensive, but comes with the territory of inkjets I suppose.

So at the end of last week the time came to place another order (thanks to a flurry of printing from Mrs H and Jnr, including some full sheets of 100% coverage A4 of which I very much disapprove), and it appears that in the POST-BREXIT apocalypse landscape inkjet cartridges have got more expensive too, to the extent that the usual order from Ebuyer was coming in at the best part of £100 including delivery - for fucking ink!

Something inside me snapped, and after I'd totally trashed the house and killed several innocent bystanders, I decided to turn to the dark side of compatible style cartridges from Amazon.

I know the quality isn't supposed to be as good and they can be a bit leaky and all that shit, but I'm at the point now where I'll just take a punt on them, and if the worst case scenario comes to pass and they trash the printer I can always buy another one for not much more than the cost of a couple of sets of genuine cartridges.

This is how much ink we got delivered from Amazon for £11.95 (we have free delivery through Prime). This much genuine ink from Ebuyer would have cost nearly £200 (!).

Hopefully they'll work properly, of course. Mind you, if they do, I'll feel like a bit of a mug for having stuck with the genuine Canon cartridges for so long......

I use a HP printer with instant ink. Looks like it will save me a lot.

£50 pages a month works out £2.99 a month. I think.

I fucking hate printers with a burning passion. Just this afternoon I was doused in toner by a fucking HP shitbox. Curse them and all that use them. Such wasteful machines! Half of the ink or toner that you buy goes straight into a waste container.

Burn them all, I say

I agree with Davpaz but still... I buy the cheap cartridges off Amazon and I think as long as you keep using your printer so the ink doesn't dry up, they're fine. Sometimes they haven't lasted as long but I'm ok with that as I save a load of money this way.

The last two I bought were £9.95 for the two. I've printed off a fair bit since having them and I can't tell the difference. I've even printed some game covers at super high quality and they've been fine.

HP printers are the worst known to mankind. Seriously avoid.

Particularly the "Shitbox" model.

Seriously, what marketing department said OK to that.

Well, the official name is the Colour LaserJet C5325, but we all know the truth.

Now the LaserJet 4n... that was a fine printer.

How many LEDs did it come with?

No more than one

I have an Epson all in one, after burning through the set of starter cartridges I ordered some new "full size" ones.

As we use this model as standard for all remote users, I found another set of starter cartridges in our workshop and thought I would use them to tide me over until the larger ones arrived

The printer refused to let me use a 2nd set of starter cartridges!!

Also seen the same sort of thing on an HP that cost me £1500 for one of our offices, the yellow full size cartridge was subject to a delivery cock up so I tried to use the starter one with 3 more full sized ones and again refused to let me.

They are a bit out of order dictating what you can and can't use, not like in my case I was using any 3rd party products!

I've been looking into getting a colour laser printer for the home but overall running costs don't seem to be much lower than inkjets, plus lasers can be slow to start up as well, and they often don't seem to do the 'all-in-one' stuff as well either, plus they can be bulky.

TBH if these hooky cartridges off Amazon work OK we'll be laughing, even if they only last half as long as the genuine ones we'll still be laughing.

I'm really not sure how they knock the things out for 60p each though, and have them be any good at all.

I couldn't go back to using inkjets, although I don't need colour printing so I went for a Samsung wireless all-in-one mono thing. I don't bother with official toner cartridges though - the last one cost me £14 from Ebay has been just fine.

PRINTER NEWS:

The first set of cartridges are in, and they seem to work fine. They're not as luxuriously packaged as the official Canon ones, but they do each come in their own box and airtight plastic bag, and they have a similar little retaining plug thingy that needs to be twisted off. Had a couple of specks of ink come out of one of them once I'd taken the plug off, but other than that no leaks at all.

The printer accepted them fine, reports its ink levels as replenished, and is printing normally - no obvious difference in quality.

For 60p per cartridge (including delivery) I really wasn't expecting much at all, but this appears to be promising.

£100 for two sets of cartridges for a £150 printer? You can fuck off with that.

I imagine the only real difference is likely to be in the longevity of the print, but unless you're using it for archival printing or something that's unlikely to be a huge concern.

Exciting new Intel CPUs released! You too can now experience 66% MORE PERFORMANCE THAN....... a five year old PC.

Fucking amazing.

Seriously, that's the sales pitch.

How old is (the processor in) your PC? Because mine's about five years old.