Its funny what happens when I try to make a small purchase online. One little item leads to another. I think I am finally out of shopping mode, and ready to take the box apart again. I have a million small plans.
I removed the chipset fan, and tried a couple of passive replacements, but did not like having to move my video card to the bottom slot, and so put the chipset fan back on. That is noisy, and has a rep for being unreliable, so I am going to try an Evercool VC-RF.
I am also going to rethink the fan wire routing. I think I will let Cool n Quiet decide the speeds of the CPU and chipset fans. That will let me give the three case fans and the Zalman 700 on the vid card their own lines on the Hardcano 12.
I will replace one of the 4" blacklights with a 12" version to try to get a bit more glow out of the box. I have vibration damper kits for the two 120mm case fans, having already installed same on the 92mm window fan. I also got some rubber fan screws. These may not play nice with the vibration damper kit, but they are cheap enough that the experiment should prove painless.
I have no interest in trying to make my own data cables, but I will replace several of the ones I have. My big complaint is that the damn things are almost always too long. Performance-PC is the ONLY place I have ever seen to offer the following: 6" floppy cable, 6" single IDE cable, and 12" dual device IDE cable. The floppy replaces a 12" cable. I will move the IDE hard drive (used for backup, mostly) to make sure the 6" cable will work in place of the current 10" cable. I am not sure the 12" dual device IDE cable is going to work, as the distance between the master and slave connectors is only about an inch. One of my optical drives is not quite as deep as the other, and I suspect this cable is meant to fit precisely on matched and stacked optical drives.
All of this got started when I decided something had to be done about the too-long modular power cables that came with my OCZ Modstream 520 Modular PSU. I have cables that are well over 24" long when in many situations 6" or 12" would do.
The current SATA cable is a mess. It looks like they originally designed it for one device, then tacked on a second at the last minute. I say this because the cable to one device is nicely wrapped like all the other cables, while the other one is a mess of ugly wires that no one even thought about wrapping. I only have one SATA device, and plan to create a cable with a molex at the PSU end and a single SATA power connector at the other end. I will wrap it with chrome Techflex.
Another problem with the current cables is that they include only a single floppy power connector. I need two - one for my floppy/card reader, and one for my DFI mobo. I've never understood the need for the latter, and the board certainly works without it, but having it connected is supposed to help with OCs somehow, and I do not think that can hurt. Right now I have a cable with one regular molex and one floppy mini-molex. I intend to make a cable with a single molex at one end and double the wires at each point in order to have two mini molexes at the other end.
I am not going to try anything with the 24 pin connector, and I probably will not try anything with a PCI-E connector, either, although I have not completely ruled that out.
The big change is with all the molex connected devices. Right now I am not even sure how many different power cables I have for the Hardcano, the two optical drives, and the IDE hard drive. I am going to use a series of so-called 'right angle' pass through connectors to put them all on a single cable. I thought these connectors had a 90 degree angle in them. They do not. They actually look like slightly miniature versions of a regular molex. The difference is that the wire enters at a right angle, rather than through the rear. I thought the kit I bought had end connectors as well, but it appears not to. That should not be a problem, as I also have a bag of conventional molexes.
I removed the chipset fan, and tried a couple of passive replacements, but did not like having to move my video card to the bottom slot, and so put the chipset fan back on. That is noisy, and has a rep for being unreliable, so I am going to try an Evercool VC-RF.
I am also going to rethink the fan wire routing. I think I will let Cool n Quiet decide the speeds of the CPU and chipset fans. That will let me give the three case fans and the Zalman 700 on the vid card their own lines on the Hardcano 12.
I will replace one of the 4" blacklights with a 12" version to try to get a bit more glow out of the box. I have vibration damper kits for the two 120mm case fans, having already installed same on the 92mm window fan. I also got some rubber fan screws. These may not play nice with the vibration damper kit, but they are cheap enough that the experiment should prove painless.
I have no interest in trying to make my own data cables, but I will replace several of the ones I have. My big complaint is that the damn things are almost always too long. Performance-PC is the ONLY place I have ever seen to offer the following: 6" floppy cable, 6" single IDE cable, and 12" dual device IDE cable. The floppy replaces a 12" cable. I will move the IDE hard drive (used for backup, mostly) to make sure the 6" cable will work in place of the current 10" cable. I am not sure the 12" dual device IDE cable is going to work, as the distance between the master and slave connectors is only about an inch. One of my optical drives is not quite as deep as the other, and I suspect this cable is meant to fit precisely on matched and stacked optical drives.
All of this got started when I decided something had to be done about the too-long modular power cables that came with my OCZ Modstream 520 Modular PSU. I have cables that are well over 24" long when in many situations 6" or 12" would do.
The current SATA cable is a mess. It looks like they originally designed it for one device, then tacked on a second at the last minute. I say this because the cable to one device is nicely wrapped like all the other cables, while the other one is a mess of ugly wires that no one even thought about wrapping. I only have one SATA device, and plan to create a cable with a molex at the PSU end and a single SATA power connector at the other end. I will wrap it with chrome Techflex.
Another problem with the current cables is that they include only a single floppy power connector. I need two - one for my floppy/card reader, and one for my DFI mobo. I've never understood the need for the latter, and the board certainly works without it, but having it connected is supposed to help with OCs somehow, and I do not think that can hurt. Right now I have a cable with one regular molex and one floppy mini-molex. I intend to make a cable with a single molex at one end and double the wires at each point in order to have two mini molexes at the other end.
I am not going to try anything with the 24 pin connector, and I probably will not try anything with a PCI-E connector, either, although I have not completely ruled that out.
The big change is with all the molex connected devices. Right now I am not even sure how many different power cables I have for the Hardcano, the two optical drives, and the IDE hard drive. I am going to use a series of so-called 'right angle' pass through connectors to put them all on a single cable. I thought these connectors had a 90 degree angle in them. They do not. They actually look like slightly miniature versions of a regular molex. The difference is that the wire enters at a right angle, rather than through the rear. I thought the kit I bought had end connectors as well, but it appears not to. That should not be a problem, as I also have a bag of conventional molexes.
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