Clean, clean clean...

Download game today
Die prematurely tonight!

Advanced search

If you registered for membership on this site but have not yet received the confirmation activation email, there are 3 main reasons.

1. It ended up in your junk or spam folder, please look there to see if it's in there.

2. You did not enter your correct email address.  Please register with a new username and the correct email address and try again.

3. Your IP address and or your Email Address is listed in the Stop Forum Spam (spam protection) database as a known spammer and when either your IP address and or your email address appears in that database, your account can not be approved.  As such if you are a spammer, please move along, our community is too small for you to bother with.  If you are NOT a spammer, contact the owners of Stop Forum Spam and get your information removed from their database and register a new account.

[City Builder]

Take a look now, because it will never be this clean and tidy ever again.

I decided that I needed to explore the rattle in my new computer as well as shift stuff around so that I have more room on my desk since I'm feeling really cramped as I had my huge Brother 5890 printer right to the right of me and it kept blocking my mouse from moving around freely, so I moved everything around, opened up my new computer (*again*) and took care of that last cable or two that was bugging me that I didn't hide it properly, and found out that I had put my PSU in upside down, the fan should be facing the bottom of the case where there is a mesh filter for fresh air, so took the time to move that too and finally added the Velociraptor drive that WD sent me as an exchange for the Raptor drive that died on me

So here it is, all clean and neat as I can get it.  Obviously theres going to be some cables showing somewhere as theres no way to hide them all.  The flashy red esata cables are at the bottom of the hdd cage simply for convenience so that I don't have to pull off the right door if I want to add another hdd sometime.

The squirrels nest of wires next to the PSU is actually wrapped up pretty neat and tidy when you see it in person.  I like it!



What I like the most however, is that I have a mouse pad that is about 2 feet long by 1.5 feet wide and when the printer was up on my desk I had an area about 6 inches by 4 inches to move my mouse around, now I've got about 12 inches by the full depth of the pad to move the mouse with nothing to bump into anymore.  It's sweet to finally have all this mousing space I can't tell you how much it used to bother me.

Once I put the door on the case, it shoves back about 18" towards the wall, it's just out in the open because when I plugged it in to the electrics, the power switch light lit up but pressing it did nothing, and the thumbdrive I have on the top of the computer lit up like a chirstmas tree, took me a few minutes to realize that I hadn't plugged all the cables right for the hdd light, usb port, power switch etc.  All good to go now though.

Yeah I do keep some little things stored inside of the case like the hdd thumbscrew type of screws (since they are not ordinary thumbscrews and would have to be special ordered and you can't mount a hdd without them) and the SLI dongle as I've lost that in the past on another computer and was told that I'd have to buy a whole new mainboard to get another one.

[crowebird]

 

[City Builder]

Dang it, the new velociraptor that I added isn't showing up in computer management nor in windows explorer.  I hope the darn thing didn't come unplugged as I really don't want to have to take off the right door again it's a [*******] to close up with all the cables on the backside all hidden away.

Is there something else I might have to do to get it to show up?  Hmmm, maybe the bios needs to recognize it first, I didn't think to enter bios first.

[pad11]

oh that is freaking sweet sweet sweet!!!!

Nice build CB, very nice!

That thing must purr!!!

later,
pat!

[City Builder]

At the moment, I'd say it rawrs more than purrs, but that's only because the CPU is still using the stock cooler so it often has to run somewhere around 5500 to 5800 RPM which really does sound like a jet engine about to take off in the distance.  So, I'm on the hunt to see what kind of replacement I can put on this that won't tax the mainboard by additional of too much extra weight.

I've heard people mention the V8 and while I've read some folks osting excellent before and after heat reduction by using the V8, the manuifacturer  (MSI) in a message on their own forum suggested not using the V8 cooler as it's just so heavy, unless one can mod the backplate in someway to support the additional weight, so I look once again.

I'm determined to shut this thing up and really make it purr, I suppose I could just turn the AC in the house down to 40° and it should run quietly then, though don't know for how long since I couldn't keep up those kinds of electrics payments

It's a whole lot louder when the side door is off since it doesn't have the benefit of that huge pie plate sized fan which really helps to keep the CPU down to about 99°f at idle, when the door is off, it goes up to about 114°f at idle and the cpu fan goes to maximum RPM, once the door is back in place however the RPM drops down to about 3700 which is still rather loud for my desires.  Anyway....  I really like it, it's the first computer that I've gotten that has made me pleased, and of course the first one that I've built in a great many years now and it felt good to do it myself.

[pad11]

Mine has six fans plus three mini RAM fans in it !  so it's like an airport when we turn it on!  But we get used to it...really don't notice it anymore...still, it's not as loud as most store baught PCs though!

pat!

[City Builder]

o.O

Oooh, then we are even now unless I get to count the fan in the PSU, in which case there would be 7 fans in this beasty.

I just added 2 60mm fans last night because I added one of my Nvidia 8800 video cards to use as a dedicated physX GPU and know that while the design of the card might be to have the hot air exhaust out the back of the case via the Nvidia 8800 heatsinks and channels, the reality is that probably a good 40 to 80% of that hot air simply doesn't leave the case at all, but rather comes right back out where they have the gills cut out of the plastic cover on the 8800 card.  So the location that they give us to to place the two 60mm fans is right about above the number 1 and number 2 pci-e slots where the two graphics cards sit, so these two small fans do a really nice job to exhaust out some of that hot air that the card doesn't exhaust itself to prevent hot spots down at that location.

Is the jet engine in your computer the 6 fans or is it maybe the CPU fan speeding along at ungodly rpm?

I guess I'm just not used to ultra silent cases as I don't know just how quiet they must be because really when I turn down the CPU fan to about 1600rpm, the computer is very very silent.  It's certainly not silent as the grave, but it's ultra quiet.  But I say I must not know what really silent computers are like since many people wrote reviews dogging this case for how loud all the fans are (even though it seems to me that all these fans are exactly what the manufacturer was going for with this case).

Anyway, I'm on the look out for a replacement CPU Fan and Heatsink to offer more cooling and less noise as I'd like to at least be able to work within an arms distance of the case and not go anymore deaf than I already am.

[pad11]

CB, my thermaltake case has a six or seven inch fan right on the clear case window that accounts for most of my noise i think...but we don't even notice it anymore!

pat!

[City Builder]

Which model Thermaltake case are you using Pat?

The picture above is the Thermaltake Element G case, it too has the pie plate (almost) sized fan on the side door.  I don't know if yours is the same as this one, but the side door's pie plate fan is connected to the rest of the case by a touch pin system, so that when you pull the door off, there is no wires that have to be unplugged, it's all done with a contact pin system where the door has the pins and the case has the contacts and when the door is in place the pins touch the contacts and the fan comes to life.

That is the one feature that threw me over the top to get this case as I can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to wire tie down my side case fan and had it chew up the fans wires or the two times where the wires got into the fan overnight while I was sleeping only to find out the fan no longer wanted to work after untangling the mess in the morning.

It's no Lian Lee, but I really don't think i could be much happier with any other case on the market today, this Thermaltake is fantastic (as I'm sure is yours) at moving air through the case.  When I had my head in the corner of the room plugging in some accessories on this case, The air from the rear fan was actually blowing my hair around and I could feel a stiff breeze of air moving around in the corner of the room behind the case, where as my old cases you could only feel the air movement if you wet your hand and put it about 1/2 inch away from the rear exhaust fan.

Yup, these thermaltakes are the bomb man.  It's a nice generation of case from them, the last ones they made wouldn't have even turned my head in the shop when looking for a case.

[pad11]

Can't remember the model right off the top of my head...it's a couple years old and the power block is on top...venting out the back and the top of the unit...i love it...it doesn't have your cool contact pin system, but I've zero complaints man!

pat!