(Case Mod) MKG-Cosmos II

[bob808]

Here's the newely painted radiator back in the case-

I ran over to Best-Buy and bought a cheapo mouse pad as I need some vibration damping material. I almost cut up some of my nice japanese mousepad, but then reason prevailed haha. I took the bottom retainling plate off the res/top and used it as a template-

After tracing the plate, I use a razor blade to cut them out.

Then I use some spray glue to join the two pieces together-

I put the pump retaining plate back on the res/top.

Then I placed the foam pad and wrapped some electrical tape around the body of the pump to help insulate vibrations further.

Here it is sitting in place-

I turned the fans around for better air pressure in the case. It's good to know that I can remove the fans (barely!) without messing with the radiators. I'm not sure how I will orient the fans in the case yet, I will have to do some testing and see what yields the best results.

Taping the white leds to the bottom of the onyx slab for more light testing.

This looks pretty cool too! This is using the red and white led strips from Modelers brand (no cathodes).

A close up showing the grain of the onyx.

Doing some wiring for the amber lights that I am putting under the motherboard. These will connect to a couple pins on the motherboard that pulse (fade on, fade off). The board came with a monster air cooler that had a couple leds on it that used this connection. I previously used the same connection to light up the red connector on the ek chipset blocks to make it pulse (again, 2 leds). I am attempting to use 9 leds from a NZXT led strip. I'm not sure if the mobo connector has enough juice to power the nine leds, but I am hoping it will be fine.

Shrink wrap insulation around the positive wire-

Another piece of shrink wrap to cover the extension solder connections-

Splicing into the middle of the nine led strip-

Done and tested-

For your information, the nzxt led strips can be cut to any desired length and will still work. Just make sure to cover the cut wire ends to prevent any shorting.

I decided to stick the white leds back-to-back and cut a channel into the bottom of the onxy to I could stick the lights up inside the slab, shining sideways toward the edges. Hopefully this will have a cool effect. I split the lights to go around the res/pump.

While cutting the slot, The piece of onyx broke along a fissure that was existing, and fissured along the length of the notch. Bummer but not the end of the road. Luckily I work with natural stone slabs for a living and know how to fix it :thumb: Here is the break glued back together with epoxy...

With some weight on it to keep it flat, as it naturally wants to bend downwards a little bit.

After the break was glued back together, I epoxied the led strips into the bottom of the slab.

the epoxy I used-

Testing the light strips-

close up

This looks like a "oh nooo!" face haha. I'm thinking this may be my new avatar. What do you guys think? should I keep my current one?

Testing the lights. This is the final result. Not what I originally envisioned but it looks cool none the less. and I am really pleased with the color matching, especially with the xigmatek fans :thumb:

overall ambient light that will be inside the case, also have the mobo lighting attached which will hopefully pulse using the mobo header.

That's it for now. and I still have more modding to do today. I'm hoping to be leak-testing by tonight, but I am not sure if I will make it.

[bob808]

Hey guys-

I've been busy with a variety of things these last few days. My Mom is in town, she just came in yesterday, so I had to clean the house up, which was way overdue anyways haha! I also spent Friday night over at my girls house. Then yardwork.. the list goes on.

I did manage to spend a good chunk of time on wiring up the beast yesterday. For now, I am just using the stock cables that came with the Corsair AX-850. I plan on getting some mdpc sleeving and making custom length cables, but haven't even ordered it yet.

Since I am not going to be using the built in fan controller that comes with the Cosmos II, I thought I might as well get rid of that huge bundle of cables for the fans and the fan leds. I took the top panel i/o off the case and just unpluged the cables. There was a couple lines of hot glue holding them together, but they pulled right off.

These are the cables that are left- much more managable!

I will save these, but am glad to be getting this large mass of spaghetti out of the case-

My X58 EVGA Classified mainboard doesn't support USB3 so I coiled up the cable and leave it tucked up under the top panel.

Next I start making a custom cable for the hdd hotswap cage that I have installed.

Here I have shortened the length between the two four-pin molex connectors. This cable is nowhere near long enough, so I also cut off the psu end and added four more molex connections and another length of cable, graciously donated from a bag of cables left over from an HX750 that I am using in a different computer. I forgot to take pictures of this, but it turned out nicely.

Here is the pretty side of the computer all wired up.

A close up of the wiring for the 5 hot-swap hdd bays-

Motherboard all wired up. The AX-850 only has one aux cpu power cable to plug in where as the hx1000 that I was previously using has both. The AX850 actually has both cables (for cpu aux power), but one of them plugs into the same socket for the pci-e cables, so you can only use either the pci-e cable (which I need) or the second 8-pin cpu power cable, not both. A little dissapointing, but not the end of all things.

Here's my first attempt at organizing all the wires on the backside. This looks very messy to me, even though I took a lot of time, trying to get things nice. This is not final though, as I will be making a full custom length cables, so it should look alot better eventually. I do not have the funds to order the sleeving, wire and necessary tools at the moment though.

Installing two Western Digital RE3 1TB hdds into the lower hot-swap cage.

I had to take the WD velociraptors out of their nice heatsink housings to make them play nice with the upper hot-swap cage.

Here are my Intel sata2 ssd along with the 2x300 gb velociraptors that I have had ever since they were cool haha. I've got the 2 velociraptors in raid 0 and also the two RE3's are in raid 0 also.

So I have got everything all wired up, and have re-filled the water loop and am leaktesting again now that everything is installed. I have yet to turn on the system. I am a little nervous, but I always am upon the first power-up.

Today, I want to get the piece of acrylic notched and polished to allow for the pci-e cables and also have a little bit of paint touch up to do as I somehow managed to scratch up the paint on the top radiator. I will also turn on this sucker` and hope that nothing smokes haha.

Down to the dungeon to do some modding!

After drawing some cut lines, I drill some holes with my old cordless Makita

Using my jig-saw, I start cutting the acrylic.

First I cut it down to size-

Then I cut out the fan grills-

Here's where I had to get a bit creative, as I don't have any type of bender. I grabbed two scrap pieces of granite that has strait edges on them, then sandwiched them where I want to bend the top of the piece. I used a heat gun to heat up the plastic, but I couldn't get the acrylic hot enough to bend with the gun. Out comes the Map Gas hand torch which gets plenty hot. I used the framing square to bend the edge down once it was good and hot. and held it there for a couple minutes while it cooled down.

I got it to this point then left to go over to the girlfriends house. The bend is a bit over bent past 90 degrees, and its too long and wont fit into the case some trimming is in order, then I'll put it in and see if I like it before I do any beveling and polishing.

It turned out not too bad, although I think I will paint it black.

[bob808]

Leak testing in progress. I had a leak where the one of the pipes go into the top gpu but have it sorted now. Looks good for the last couple hours. I'm dying to plug it in and load up some Diablo III but I figure I'll leak test it overnight and power it up in the morning.

Hopefully everything is kosher. I've got everything hooked up, but I haven't turned it on since I tested the board yesterday.

Here are a couple pictures showing the leak testing and a couple new stickers I got today :thumb:

What is this?

[bob808]

Here are some pictures of my sleeving that has been in progress allllll niiiggght

I recieved my other pachage from Nils yesterday. it's beautiful! :wubsmiley

Well, there goes another warranty.....

I had to make the hole bigger....

My first ever attempt at sleeving

different patterns, the 3 and 1 bundles are pci-e 6+2 pins-

Here's the tools I'm using. I'm just eyeballing the heatshrink lengths....

I had to make the hole even bigger! and found some stuff to make the edges soft-

I'm working on the 24 pin cable now. I couldn't find a guide for how to get a stuck pin out of a 25 pin plug lol.

Well I stayed up all night sleeving this bad-boy. Marathon sleeving session!

I've got some more pictures to share with you guys-

Here are all the cables I got sleeved. It took me like 20 hours ...

I painted the half of the case that I removed also. I'm going to get a couple custom stickers made for it.

I'm going to go sleep the sleep of the dead now, until I have to wake up for work tomorrow. At least I feel like I got my weekends worth of modding in!

[bob808]

Here's a picture of the sleeved fan controller. It had two molex power connectors which came together in a 'Y', so I consolidated them into one connector.

a couple of fans in the process of getting their sleeves-

Here is the start of a single cable with four power ends on it (2 sata and 2 molex) for the hot-swap caddy that I have installed. These are the sata power ends.

sata and molex

Plugs put back on and extensions soldered-

more wires!

I have used up all my orange sleeving except for about 6" and have used even more black. I'm guessing that I have use more than 200' of sleeving thus far. I had 30 meters of orange which is gone now.

I went ahead and put in a 140mm cougar far which I painted into the hx1000 which I also painted.

Here are a few more of the HX1000. I still need to get some lable stickers printed for this-

Thats it for now. I still need to make a molex power cable with 4 ends on it, one for the soundcard, and a sleeve a couple small misc cables, then I can wire it all back up and hope it works haha.

How should I test the psu before I hook it up to the cosmos 2? I'm thinking I should test it on one of the cheaper computers I have laying around first.

Those two 8-pin cpu power cables were a pain in the butt! I still have some work to do, mainly making the cable to supply power to the molex plugs I have on the back side. I also have quite the mess going on the backside of the motherboard tray that needs tidying up. It's getting there though :thumb: I need to 'train' the wires a bit better as I have some tangling/weaving in and out in the pci-e cables.

[bob808]

I decided to split the 5 molex power connections between 2 cables.

I started out with a 4-plug strip and cut off the 3rd connection and soldered the wires together. I wanted the extra length between the 2nd and 3rd connection anyway.

Then I sleeved the cables when the plug ends were off of the wires.

Using a diagram that I drew up earlier, I inserted the cables into the correct places in plugs.

One down, one to go!

These last couple cables have to be all black, as I have used up the 30m of orange sleeve that I ordered. No biggie as these will be on the back side of the motherboard tray.

I finally got my last cable sleeved! Here it is on top of the other one-

Well I got all the wiring figured out. It turns out I had 2 wires in the wrong positions. One on the fan controller power cable, and the other on the stock hot-swap power cable. Luckily for me, it wasn't too hard to get straightened out.

I have tidied up the wires on the backside of the motherboard, and everything is working like it is supposed to

[bob808]

System specs-

EVGA x58 3-way sli Classified

Core i7-920 overclocked to 4.25

Corsair dominators running at 2005 MHz with 7-7-6-18 timings

SLI EVGA 480's

Asus Zonar Essence STX soundcard

Corsair hx1000 psu

Intel 80gb ssd

2x WD veliciraptor 300gb in raid 0

2x WD RE3's 1tb in raid 0

cooling-

cpu block- Heatkiller 3.0 copper

gpu blocks - Aquacomputer aquagraFX

chipset block- EK x58 classified

pump- swiftech mcp655 variable

radiators- one xspc ex360, two xspc ex240's

fittings- bitspower

resevoir- ek pump-top

Misc-

monitors- 30" LG W3000H (2560x1600 center main screen), dell 24" 2405FPW (1920x1200 in portrait mode right-side), dell 24" U2412M (1920x1200 in portrait, left side)

Keyboard- Ducky 10 key-less OCN branded mech keyboard w/cherry browns

mouse- Mionix Naos 5000

headphones- SennheiserHD650

speakers- Altec Lansing

mic- Audio-technical

Finished pictures on the first post

[bob808]

Did anyone read all that? I know it was a lot to go through, it was a ton of work but it was worth it

[frozensnail]

Did anyone read all that? I know it was a lot to go through, it was a ton of work but it was worth it

Sure did & a lot of work, well worth it & great mod all round

[oldman]

Let me say that it was nice to find someone who wrote more than I did (and did better work than I did, too!).

I read it all and enjoyed looking at such great craftmanship!