Away from the stressful bit of the day…
My order from Performance-PC’s arrived today (the custom PSU, plus some fan grills, a custom floppy drive and new CPU/gfx card coolers). Everything arrived in top notch condition. The PSU was a breeze to install, as was the CPU cooler. The fan grills took a bit longer than they should have, due to them being a bit bigger than normal 80mm grills. The two on the front intake fans actually overlap each other. Ah well. Didn’t fit the new gfx cooler, cos a) I couldn’t be arsed and b) I think it might be better to mount it on the Northbridge chip anyway. Will need to get some thermal epoxy for that.
The PSU is fantastic. The braiding on the cables is top quality. Everything now looks a bit neater. Some cabling still needs tidying up, but that’s mainly minor stuff. As wierd as it may sound, all the LEDs in the case seem a bit brighter since installing the new PSU… could be just my imagination though!
The CPU cooler (a Coolermaster X-Dream) is also great. Spinning the fan at full power makes it a better cooler than my Thermalright SLK-800 (the king of heatsinks) and 80mm fan combo. Looks a lot better as well, even with the stock fan grill (which I’ve swapped for one of my new ones). Unfortunately, it’s loud.
The floppy drive has a black, anodised aluminium face plate, so it matches the finish of my case. Other than that, it’s a standard floppy – nothing exciting. It’s only there for the times when I need to flash the BIOS, personally, I’d consign all FDD’s to the scrapheap, if it wasn’t for their amazing ability to get you out’ve trouble when your machine fails… I do need to get a 3mm bl00 LED for it though. I will not tolerate non-bl00ness in my case!
All this new stuff means that there are only a few bits and bobs I need to do, before my PC is finished.
- match the CD drive to my case
- sort the lighting
- tidy the wires at the bottom of my case (the front panel connector stuff and the LCD wire)
- Replace the top mounted “blow-hole” fan, to match the other case fans
and that’s pretty much it! All the hard work will be done and I’ll have one sexhay PC