dO_ob

Happy Christmas!! 

If by Santa u mean myself then he brought me GTX 980.
I guess he knows I've been good.

3dmark is 50% off on steam!! time to bench our rigs!!
 
http://store.steampowered.com/app/223850/ 

I do love the Strom Scout 2 adv's appearance apart from the internal chassis being quite old and only 7 expansion slots, and if you are going to put a radiator in it you can only choose 120mm which is quite a shame, i would suggest the Core V51 or Core V41 its packed with so much radiator mounting variations and you can take all the drive bays out which will help with dual + card setups

I've re-modified this post to be more official. We are away! 
 
I've kept this under wraps for a little while, but now is a better time as any to get this going. It'll help me kick myself into gear to get it across the finish.          Meet my mascot - Tina the stuffed Alpaca. Tina approves of the V71.     Worklog   First off - I stripped the case. Top panel. Front Panel. Side panels. I stripped it down 'till it was #### naked. This is an easy process with the V71.   And now, the hard work begins.    I grabbed the case front panel and very patiently (which may or may not have had excessive amounts of cursing) began prying the front mesh away from the front plastic.                  I am by no means a handyman. But I love to learn, and I love to do things as best as I can.    I reached a point where I had no choice but to dremel two of the centre mesh metal clips. Several thousand more curse-words later - I did succeed in separating the two.     If you're wanting to do this at home, I recommend a pair of long nosed pliers, a thin towel/fabric and patience. Don't resort to the dremel like I did. I felt like Jeremy Clarkson after with a chainsaw.      I decided that because the colour of choice was necessary to be bright as possible, I had this notion in my head that a white primer was best.    After a lot of cleaning, de-dusting, de-oiling with some light metho - the primer was applied.    I've been told there are grey primers that may have been better than what I had chosen - nonetheless I went ahead and primed:                 (I note that the above images is over two days. We had some nice hot days in Sydney, Australia during this process which really helped.    I also had some modder's mesh lying around for a different case mod and I decided to test the bonding between the paint and the primer.      This turned out to me mostly good, however I noticed that the paint did take a lot longer to dry.  I've been told that primers and paints can have different chemical mixtures and can sometimes have issues sticking to each other. Anyone else have this experience?   Unfortunately, Sydney Australia was hit with a huge number of storms and this delayed more painting greatly. There were a couple of great sunny weekends to do more painting, but we were either reluctant for fear of more whacky weather, but also the fear that the paint wouldn't correctly stick and we monitored the modder's mesh test closely.    I've managed to get the first coat of red onto the front. It will DEFINITELY need some sanding to get the coats right, but it's a labour of love as I'm sure many of you know.    But the red was a good choice.       The reason for such a bright red is because I want the end result to have two very different looks.  By day - it will have layers of red and black all compiled together. The mesh will be staying unpainted and as-is. The red honeycomb will peek through the mesh exactly like this:     And by night? -Well - that's something I'll have to show when I have the parts. (Still on the hunt for CPU cooling, GPU, SSD, Fans, 3mm LED's and many other little items to add - Saving in November with Xmas around the corner is just - INSANE!)   Just in case I drop the ball on the painting, I'm ordering a second front and top panel (with thanks to this forum for directing me there. Thank you guys).   I'm also calling up some friends who are handy with a soldering iron to help me out further. As soon as my funds come through, I'll be investing in some more paint and some tools to commence dismantling my PSU.   

never done a theme before but will maybe in the future, actually OK here is my alien mod since its impossible to fix the tubes and looks quite ugly

My current rig is going to be a Thermaltake / AMD build if I can get more money saved up for it.  

Thanks Tt Andy and thank you d0_ob as well, you guys are awesome!

Depending if you want ones with LED or non LED but i would strongly suggest Luna fans, they come with Anti vibration mounting and have awesome airflow
http://www.thermaltakeusa.com/Cooling/Case_Fan_/Luna/C_00002230/Luna_12_LED_White/design.htm 

Yea I defientely want ones with LED. Those fans look really nice and those would be perfect for the bottom. Thanks a lot for the help!

Thermaltake offers a complete line of 80Plus Gold power supply — Toughpower DPS G, Toughpower Grand, and Toughpower series.
 
 

Thank you for reminding me that i need more lemon Pledge,  it does work on everything.

i shove it behind the motherboard also, as long as i cant see it through the window its fine

pledge !!!

i shove it behind the motherboard also, as long as i cant see it through the window its fine

Does that mean you can buy a bronze 750w which performs close to a platinum 600w?

PSU is very important, but efficiency is not the only fact, I have seen PSUs with an 80 PLUS rating but have horrible wattage control, so while the 80 PLUS efficiency is definitely something to get, it is not the only thing to consider. 

With that being said I currently own 3x PSUs :

Thermaltake DPS G 650W - 80 PLUS Gold
Corsair AX 760 - 80 PLUs Platinum
SuperFlower 450W - 80 PLUs Gold

The other thing is people also need to be better informed about the wattage their system uses, a lot of people go way overkill when it comes to PSU. My 450W can run an overclocked 4770K on a Z97 board with a GTX 770 alongside it and while it is pushing it to its very boundaries, I have ran it as such for weeks straight with no worries! 

I see a lot of Platinum in my future
 
Currently running Gold atm

Not really, if you have a PC that is pulling, say 300 watts at full load, your platinum 600w PSU will pull say 320 watts from your wall, where at your bronze 750w will most likely pull 360, doesn't really matter what your max wattage is when it comes to pulling what it needs in terms of power.  Plus, the extra wattage the bronze is pulling equals extra heat being generated in your PC, heat that is being generated by waste and can be avoided.

There is also a quality difference, the bronze will most likely cost less, but at what expense? Cheaper capacitors, lower life expectancy, modular cabling, warranty, etc.  You also have to think how good the ripple suppression  is, voltage regulation, and heat generation.

oooo I may have to look into getting this to replace those of competitors I am currently using in my core v51

Fellow Core V1 owner's, just wanted to let you guys know that the Core V1 side panel is now on Ttbuy! 
Check out this thread for more details! 

Does the case support a zotac gtx 970 amp extreme? went to a computer store today and they said it might not fit. just wanna confirm it from you guys directly because we don't want to be spending and end up with a problem. hope for a quick response!

Hello G_Board,
 
The cooler on that card is actually quite beefy, it's a 3 slot card with a length of 302mm.
The Core V1 maximum GPU support is 285mm. Have you thought about using the other zotac versions of the GTX 970?

Looking forward to see the rig!

looking forward to seeing the progress Van, good luck on the build!!