A quick update after a bunch of work last weekend.
I spent about five hours on Saturday working on the box. I started with putting the mobo tray back in the case before continuing with any wiring. Well, that didn’t go so well. It may not be apparent from the previous pics, but the CPU cooler stands higher than everything else, and as I (un)lucked out, it was about 1/4 inch too tall from making it back into the case. So I had to remove the motherboard and the expansion cards from the tray, insert the tray, and remount everything inside the case. That was a better option in my book than taking off the cooler and cleaning and reapplying fresh thermal compound.
After all that was done I went back to wiring. I shortened the wires of four of the case fans and added new connectors. I also spent quite a while soldering up a couple Y-adpaters which let you connect two fans to a single motherboard header (except only using the rpm wire of one of them). I also sheathed the main front panel wires (power switch, power led, reset switch, HDD led). With all that done, the motherboard side of the case is looking decent; the psu side is still a big mess.
Sunday I decided I needed a break from wiring and started with some other stuff. First I pulled the DVD drive from my old machine to move to the new comp. But the greyish drive enclosure just didn’t look right, so I masked it up and painted the case black. It’s about this time that I realized things had gotten completely silly. Then once the drive was dry I put it in and started….finally…loading the OS. After a couple hours I had 64-bit Vista and the basic drivers installed. After another couple I had a second partition set up, anti-virus loaded, and all the OS and driver updates installed. And don’t be hatin’ on Vista, after all, check out the available RAM 🙂
Since then I’ve only been loading system apps/utilities. I have to move another hard drive into it before I can load the major stuff, and only after that will I worry about system tweaking and overclocking. Not to mention there’s still a bunch of wiring work left.
Tags: Comp hardware / mods
