Definitely an Awesome job Fueler. You have a lot of time in that case but it was worth it. You have something that no one else has now. Now put them cpus back to work, they have rested enough!

There was an article written about that which I can't seem to find at the moment but the jist of it was in order to create the amount of magnetic flux that you would need to erase a hard drive (simulating what a read/write head does floating less than a thousands of an inch above the disc...except all over the entire disc) you would need a magnet strong enough to suck the iron out of your blood....so no I don't think it should be a problem

I fired those guys up about 2 o'clock this afternoon they won't get shut down again except for maintenance

There is one last little touch I would like to add but I have no skill s with this type of stuff so maybe somebody could help me?

I would like a transfer of this (just the lettering and the logo not the background) to vinyl or what ever would work so I can apply it to both of the side covers at the top (full length of the side panel preferably)

i've already converted the logo to 150 dpi for an upcoming review, do you want the "folding overclocking" part exactly like that or do you actually want overclocking replaced with the word folding?

the text is vector based, but the logo isn't (i don't have the original artwork so i retouched and upscaled), so ask the vinyl graphics place if 150 dpi CMYK is ok... or i could make it higher...

Exactly like it is "folding overclocking"

I don't want to change our calling card.....just mod it

Edit: I also need to know how to get it transfered to some sort of decal or applique that can be applied to the panels

when i wanted to get my vinyl paint masks cut i just phoned/emailed a load of vinyl graphics places to get quotes and ask for image format requirements... i'm sure it's as easy as sending a hires bitmapped image off to them and they just print it out on the magic stuff and send it to you



i don't have the exact font on my computer, but here's a quick mock up, including genuine imitation lexan background lol

That's what I'm looking for but do you think 150dpi will have the resolution I need to span a 15" panel?

Fueler, once again you have created something simply amazing. I would love to have the talent, time and patience to do something like that. You could make some serious cash with those skills. I knew that you wouldn't let the wires go without hiding them, you are to big of a perfectionist. I would have to have everything exactly semetrical if I did something like that - probably the reason that I will never develope a similar talent.

it's really up to what the vinyl place thinks, but a lot of printers will say 150dpi is fine enough resolution... DPI is just dots per inch, so I was just saying that I forged the OCC banner into vector art in order to increase the size of it (as used in the new OCC background, and an upcoming product review)... the text is quite easy to scale to any resolution at all since it's now vector based... the fan, however, remains pixel based and thus will suffer from some artifacting if enlarged drastically...

I've already made the design 11.83" from left extreme to right (of the actual logo including fan), so it wouldn't take much to increase it to 15 inches minus some blank border space

I think that it looks awesome! Very simple but effective, and it will match your furniture to boot! I have one quick question though, sorry if it was mentioned and I missed it. How are the hard drives attatched to the motherboards? All I can see is the IDE cable going under the motherboard.

Again great work!

I guess when you say that all you can see is the IDE cable going under the mobo, you are referring to where the cable folds over to the back of the mobo from the IDE connector on the mobo.....right?

I folded, bent and mutilated the cables until I got them into a shape like this so that they would fit into the 1/4" of space behind the motherboards.



You can see here where they exit from behind the boards and plug into the drives.

Got an email from Newegg.....my fans are backordered......the only other place I could find them was Directron....great pricing too, only twice as much as Newegg wanted for the same CoolerMaster fans. The good news is now the freight is only half the cost of the fans (same shipping cost as Newegg) shipped from half the distance

Simply WTFOMFGBBQ Amazing!


PS. You know if someone would actually provide us with the psd of the logo and the fonts used, it would make it easier for the arteests out there, not to mention make the work look better instead of taking the crappy chopped up logo that's up there now

the font part is relatively easy... that i can do (well, i already have for my sigpic, the new occ wallpaper, and an upcoming occ review)... the fan though... i think megavyrus made it and i dunno if he's still around or has the original vector art (if it was ever vector art) or hi-res version etc...

Fueler, i think you should stop worrying about the fans and get some Feng-Shui pebbles in a bowl and maybe some pot pourri petals to scatter on the table... much better than silly fans

thanks nrg (and bosco)

So does anybody have anything that they think I could use for the panel decals? I f so send them and let me have a look at them....really anything you guys could do will be better that what I am capable of. also do you think I could just use a good potoprinter to tranfer it to a clear sheet (do the make one with an adheasive backing?)

i'm cringing at the fan quality a bit, but this is about the best i can do unless i spent like 2 days trying to recreate the fan from scratch



@ 150 dpi that should be 13.78" wide (i assumed you'd want a slight blank border)

I see what you mean....maybe I'll just have to forget about the logo part

ask bosco who did the fan artwork for the new logo... megavyrus did the original one ages ago, but someone has redone it to add O CC like that, so *someone* has it in better quality than me... all i need is that original artwork to place there instead of the 10x enlarged one lol

lol, yeah...that fan is...uh...yeah, well you know

btw, I'm not a big fan of the font you used for the word "folding"...looks like you have an accent over the i

lol yeah, i don't have many "informal handwriting" fonts... i'll find one closer to the requested one once i get that fan original from bosco

When I got home last nite the new green led fans had arrived so I slapped them in real quick and took a couple of pics. They are obviously going to need some additional tweeking before I get them to where I like them. The Led's face outward towards the outside of the case not toward the inside!. (they light up my office more than the inside of the case ) So I'll do some more work on them then post the final pics but for now here's the couple I took last night.





The first one was with a backlight the second is in total dark

Edit: Nemo I found some nice candles for the final pics, I'm hopping I can get a nice reflection of them off of the black glossy front bezel

I love the subtle green glow in the case, but the fans themselves seem a bit much, at least the side ones do. It may be better to just get clear fans and have green leds separate shining up from the bottom front of the case (and maybe a couple from the back top). It would also eliminate your problem of illuminating the outside more than the inside, unless you plan on disassembling the fans and switching that around.

it's very hard to take pictures in the dark... i'd put money on the fans not actually looking nearly as bright as that with the naked eye... i remember from trying to take pics of my Tsunami case with UV lighting and it was SO hard to get anything like a true representation of what it looks like in real life... i'm not sure if it's actually possible due to the difference between the eye, cameras, and display devices lol

adding this to the upcoming worklog article

That's a good point. I don't use LED fans much at all anymore, but back when I did my "dark" or "glow" pictures always used to make the fans seem a lot brighter than they were. Either way though, I like the idea of LEDs in the case instead of on the fans. That would give more of an ambient light feel. Plus, it would allow you to have the lights on a switch.

The fans are much brighter in the pics than they really are but I also would like to be able to turn them off (especially at night, makes my office look like an alien encounter) So like I said ...I still have some tweaking to do

i know what you mean about the alien encounter thing... i've resorted to even pulling out the blue power led from my case, turning mice upside down (dpi indicator), covering keyboard leds, and all sorts of goofy workarounds!

if i have all the leds lit up and the lights out, i can still navigate my room lol... it's like a NASA control centre at night with them all on!

i've gone off LED fans altogether now, but i think your idea of adding in a "Pimp Mode" switch is cool... i guess you'd have to bi-wire the fans then? or splice in a remote switch?

That's pretty much the idea and I think while I'm at it I'll wire the switch for three modes ...off/5v/12v and see how that works out....might still need to do more though to tone these suckers down

Looks great man I think im going to have to build one for my server computer when I get them up and running (fan led's switch's in my post later on working on it now)

Fixing the LED's in my fans turned out to be a lot more involved than I originally thought it would be. Up untill now I usually used Antec fans (when I wanted LED's) or Panaflos for water cooling. The Antecs are easy to modify they have a flexable pcb that goes around the outside of the fan with surface mount resistors and LED's, the whole thing ties into the wiring for the fan with one set of +/- leads that can be easily cut and separated from the fan wiring.

These coolermaster fans aren't anything like that. Not that the way they did it is bad but it sure made things a lot harder to do. The reason I went with these fans for the case was because I liked the green color better than Antec's plus these fans are crystal clear not a matte finish like Antecs. They are also nearly dead silent at full speed.....no need for a 50ohm resistor inline to slow them down to a low roar....with pretty good airflow (at least as good or better than the antecs with the resistors in place)

I had to pull the fan blades off to get to the guts of the motor....coolermaster used one resistor per LED but at least they weren't surface mount which would have made things almost too hard. In order to separate the LED's from the fan circuitry I was going to have to cut each resistor loose from the board on the hot side going to each LED. I left the ground side alone and tied into the fan ground.

The resistor leads are marked in red where I'm going to make the cut (I had to map out the board from underneath first to make sure I cut the right lead



I pushed the resistors out to the edge of the board so that the leads hung over the edge about a 1/16" then striped about 3" of wire and solderd it (bare no insulation) to each resistor in a circle around the board with the wire lead exiting with the rest of the fan leads.



I know leaving a bare hot wire hanging out seems nuts but unless you want to shove your finger into a spinning fan it's about impossible to get to and is completly surrounded by non-conducting plastic.




I don't think I mentioned it before but the led's are glued inplace and there was no way to just remove and place them somewhere else in the case.

I hooked the LED's up to a SPST mini switch which has a center Off position.....so the choices are off, 5 volt or 12 volt.




I should have everything buttoned up again before too long and then I'll try somemore pics.


Edit: I have a bit of sad news.....several weeks ago I posted in this forum that I was taking a break from the project so that my son and I could go the NHRA Gatornationals....and it was indeed a fantastic race, the weather was clear an cool with just a hint of wind and the cars were just loving it, Prostock cars, bikes and ProMod records were dropping like flies. But one of the more interesting races happened in Top Fuel Funny Car. Rooky driver Ashley Force won her first race in top fuel funny car in the first round and team member Eric Medlen took out his boss John Force in the first round. Things got a little hairy in the second round though..... with the race well in hand Eric Medlens car suddenly took a hard turn into the right wall at the big end of the track but other than losing the race because of a disqualification (for hitting the wall) Eric was fine. On the very next set of cars Ashley Force had the same problem only her car took a hard turn into the left wall, again other than losing the race because of a disqualification Ashley was fine.

Drag Racing is a violent sport especialy Top Fuel....consider this ....one cylinder in a Top Fuel car makes more horsepower than an entire Nascar race engine and Top Fuelers have eight cylinders.

On Monday the day after the race many teams stayed at Gainesville to make test runs and work out some of the problems they may have been having. Eric Medlen was one of those who stayed....on his practice run he hit the wall again only this time the results were tragic, Eric never regained consciousness and after several attempts to relieve the pressure on his brain Eric was finally taken off life support and allowed to pass away. Medlen

My heart goes out to the entire Medlen family, friends and the John Force Racing Team......Eric will be sorely missed

um this might be to late but...the leds should of bine on 1 line on the outer edge of the circit...then all you had to do was cut the connection and put wire on each side to go to the switch.... but the way you did it will work im just scard of that wire...

EDIT: oh and you could of used wire from a IDE cable thay everyone have 100's of

Yeah..... they should have been on one line ....but they weren't so I had to do it this way

My "KIll a Watt" meter showed up today and I couldn't wait to put it to use. I was fairly sure that I was going to be pushing the 510 atx PC Power and Cooling PSU to the ragged edge to power a pair of e6300 based pc's two hard drives and three led fans (especially running the SMP client at 100%) but I nearly fell out of the chair when I saw this:









One of the main reasons for this build was to help with my electric bill (this rig did replace seven other folding rigs)......mission accomplished

nice

Still not completely happy with the lighting but I think I'm making progress. This is at the 5 volt setting.

i think that uses less power than my AXP rig!

uses less then mine already

I'm sorrry guys......I went through $22.00 worth of batteries and nearly forty pics with every type of lighting I could think up but this was the best I could do for the final night shot ( a photographer I am not....this was harder than building the thing)




I do have a few final thoughts though. The magnetic side panels and front bezel are like a god send....I will never build another custom case without this feature.... they just work that good!! My next office computer will also be a dual pc single psu design.....I see tons of possibilities.

A office computer/gaming pc with a back up pc for the second unit.
A general purpose pc combined with a folding pc
Two all out gaming pc's for the lan party crowd
The list goes on and on, it's only limited by your imagination.
Surely the 1 killowatt plus psu's available now would be able to handle just about anything you could think of. (I think the power requirements that manufacturers claim are way over blown to cover their a**)

I hope you enjoyed the build....I certainly had a lot of fun (and some frustrations) bringing it to you.

Until next time

lol... you know, you could have bought a 1 hour fast charger, some highest capacity Nickel Metal-Hydride (Ni-MH) batteries and/or an AC adaptor for the camera for that much money... I usually switch to manual mode for taking tricky photos and then take a variety of settings for a shot, because invariably the light meter is slightly off...

though the accent lighting is very pretty (hehe) I think you made it like 100 times harder to photograph by having an intense light in pretty much pitch black darkness with a very feint glow from the subject... I'd have probably tried to create some very soft ambient lighting (maybe the accent candles lol) but out of the shot, so that only the rig was lit...

I dunno though, I'm no pro photographer, so I also find it very difficult for "night shots"...

the case lighting however, is a very noticeable improvement on the preliminary shots, being much more balanced, with no over-the-top exposure of the side fan and just looks much more what I'd see with the naked eye...

time to finish up the article I guess

Actually I did have accent lighting......a lot of it....and I tried every material and reflective contraption I could think of to keep the light from reflecting off of the acrylic panels

Edit: You can see the ambient light just by looking at the wall that is lit up in the background. The batteries my camera uses are 2CR5's....the rechargables are $50 the charger which you can only buy from Canon is or was $75.

try typing "2CR5" or "2CR5 Canon" into ebay.com and you'll find the batteries+charger can be had for peanuts

229W!??!?!!?!?!?!

Good lord! I'd say "mission accomplished" on the power reduction, Fueler! That's amazing. I'd love to see some ppd/watt calculations on this dual rig design! Imagine if you made it diskless.

Anyways, great job on the build. The new fan pics look a lot better (the green is a lot less intense and more ambient). I said it at the beginning and I'll say it again now. You sure do make a helluva worklog! They're a real treat to follow along with.

I made a hi-res version of the vinyl graphic, 14" wide @ 720dpi = 10065x2292 pixels, CMYK with transparency

Full Size TIFF version: fueler vinyl print copy.tif
Full Size PNG version: fueler-vinyl-print.png
Full Size JPEG preview: fueler-vinyl-print-preview.jpg
Small JPEG preview, 1000x228: fueler-vinyl-print-preview2.jpg



Credit to jammin for reproducing the fan to make this vinyl graphic possible

I,ve already started tracking my electric bill as compared to last year.....Electric bill.....definitely an improvement there Not quite sure how to do the ppd/watt calculations though.

1) My meter will give me a KWH/hour that shows the energy consumption since power was applied to the unit and the cumulative time since power was applied to the unit.

2) When running either a 2604 or a 2605 (1760 Points) it takes 19min 5sec per percent X 100 = 1905min or 31.75 hours.

3) a 2608 is a little slower and less points (1385 points) 23min 55sec per percent X 100 = 2355min or 39.25 hours.

Should I run the Kwh/hour meter for 39.25 hours and just keep track of which WU's it's working on during that time span and average it out?

Fixing the Led's in the fans turned out to be a little more difficult than I had thought it would be......I wanted to be able to turn down the lights without affecting fan speed so I had to seperate them from the fans so that when I turned down the lights the fans kept running at full speed.

Thanks Hardnrg and Jammin for all the help on the decal graphic.....I'll get it on the side covers as soon as I can

Looking forward to seeing it once the graphics go on there

It'll be a nice finishing touch to a great project.

Congratulations on some great craftsmanship with the case.

I am interested to know what make/model Mill and Lathe you are using?

I just read the all worklog and that is one BADASS Build

nice case how much did it cost to make ?? if u dont mind telling us

Beautiful mod!