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Showing results for tags 'Sword'.
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I'm a noob to the Tt forum, yay me I purchased the SwordM case back in '08, installed an ASUS P6T7WS mobo with a first gen 3 GHz i7 running 12Gb of tri-channel DDR3, an ASUS GTX480 gpu and a pair of 15K rpm 250Gb WD Raptor drives in raid 0 for the system disk. It's currently still running, now with Windows 10. Was considering upgrading the cpu to a six core Xeon or unlocked i7 extreme.... but with the latest advances in cpu die architecture being realized on the new Skylake platform combined with the expanded bandwidth the Z170 boards are offering, I'm thinking I may wait till Q3 or 4 of this year to see if Intel releases the six/eight core Skylake chips before I undertake any significant upgrades. All that being said, the point of this post originates from the complete lack of SwordM threads or posts within the forum. It's huge, it's bulky and has some oddball custom parts that make it tricky to work with at times.... BUT I love it It's impossibly sturdy and durable and is constructed of aluminum extrusions... some of which can be found in various colors/shapes/sizes online (such as the frame braces that hold the door panels together, or the rails used for most of the other frame reinforcements). It doesn't come without it's own set of problems however.... in my case, the top panel and side door gas springs (MDI model 08AA's) had cheap seals, and all three failed... losing all internal gas pressure AND the lubricating oil in the process. The oil dripped down the inside of the chassis onto several fans which lovingly sprayed the oil evenly throughout the case. Oil is non-conductive, no problem there.... dust can be though, and dust sticks very well to oil. One day the machine wouldn't get beyond BIOS, and upon internal inspection, the oil issue was discovered. COMPLETE CASE DISASSEMBLY and cleaning followed. Sourced new, higher quality gas springs (I hope, they're RV furniture-grade now) and rewired everything. Learned alot about the construction of the chassis during this process. In the future I wish to machine the front aluminum face to accept a new I/O panel: such as deleting the eSATA/power ports, switching to USB 3.0 and increasing the number of available ports from 2 to 4, changing the power/reset switches and LEDs, and modifying the rear swinging door to include clean, panel-mounted cable pass-thru's (think of small 8"-12" cable jumpers, connecting to the mobo/gpu/psu input/output ports, ending with just enough slack to completely open the rear door without having to disconnect any cabling or worry about clearance issues with cables vs liquid cooling pumps/lines/etc.) If anyone out there still owns one of these unique cases, please weigh in, I'd love to hear your thoughts and your own experiences!