Floyd's Custom PC Build

This is a documentary of my first attempt at building a PC with a custom case, otherwise called "Modding".  I'm pretty pleased with the results.  My goal for the whole project was to do it for about $300 or thereabouts, and I came pretty close.  I went over a little getting supplies I didn't have on hand, but that left me with plenty of extras that I can use for my next custom case project. 

I did a lot of research of motherboards, processors, bundles of various combinations of components, etc to find the best set of features for the best price.  I knew I wanted to get an AMD processor.  At first I though of getting a barebones system with an AMD 1800+ processor.  I wasn't happy with any of the barebones systems I found though, so I decided to investigate getting the parts individually.  I also thought maybe a faster processor would be nice too... like maybe a 2100+ (equivalent to an Intel 2.1 Gigahertz).  I finally opted for an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ processor.  I decided on that because I could get it with AMD certified fan and 3 year warranty for $89.88, which was actually a couple of bucks less than the 2100+ without the fan (no fan gave the 2100+ only a 1 year warranty).  For the motherboard, I went with an ECS K7VMM.  It has a VIA KM266 chipset and supports the ATA 133 spec for fast hard drive transfers.  It also supported 4X AGP.  I could have gone for the 8X AGP support but I don't do gaming or anything that's video intensive, so that wouldn't have gained me anything either.  Besides, when I benchmarked the video speed it was MUCH faster then what I had before.  I'm actually pretty impressed with it for being a built-in video controller.  Anyway, the ECS board also supports both DDR RAM and standard PC133 DIMMs, so I could make use of the PC133 RAM I already had, and upgrade later if I wanted to.  One of the most appealing things is it's support for 6 USB 2.0 ports.  It also has on board S3 Savage8 video, built in sound, and on-board Ethernet port so there was nothing extra to add or buy.  Best of all, the price of the motherboard was an unheard of $55.00.  So far, I love it, by the way, and would recommend it to anyone.  For the case, I wanted something that looked really cool.  I got a Supercase TU-129 mid-tower with 350 watt ATX (P4 ready) power supply.  The case has 4 exposed 5 1/4 inch bays, 2 exposed 3 1/2 inch bays, one internal 3 1/2 bay for hard drive, and 2 additional removable 3 1/2 inch carriers for additional hard drives if needed.  It also has 2 front mounted USB ports that will connect to 2 of the 4 extra spots on the motherboard.  Oh yeah, I got all this at www.mwave.com.  Excellent place if you need PC parts.  Shipping is very reasonable, and it arrived quickly.  The prices are outstanding too.. 

So, I ordered this, and the other components to go with it and just had to wait until all the parts came in.  It seemed like an eternity.  I'll let you in on a little of what my plans were.  For the "Custom" part of this project, I wanted to cut holes in the case, mount clear Lexan or something similar so that the insides were exposed, and give it a light show.  The light show consists of two 12 inch neon tubes (1 red and 1 blue) mounted inside to light up the interior.  It also includes 2 clear fans that are lit with colored LEDs.  One fan is red and blue, the other is red/blue/green.  To add to this, I decided to change the boring green and red lights for power and hard drive activity, as well as the LEDs on the keyboard.  I decided to replace them with really cool looking bright blue LEDs.  And, to top things off, I had a Timex Indiglo alarm clock I wasn't using that has a cool blue backlit display and I decided to rip it apart and cram it inside my PC with the display and buttons mounted to the front of the PC somehow. 

Since I had to wait for the other stuff to come in, I decided to start working on the alarm clock idea first.  Here is the alarm clock with all the "guts" removed.

Notice the display is really close to the circuit board.  The display is connected with a short 18 wire ribbon cable about 3 inches long at most.  Behind the display you can see the tan colored board just below the red and yellow wires.  That board has the buttons that allow you to set the date and time and the 10 wire connector for it is even shorter.  So... my first project was to cut those ribbon cables, and insert a section of ribbon cable to lengthen it so I could insert the board into an empty bay in the computer, and have enough length on the cables to mount the buttons and display on the front of the PC.  The ribbon cable I inserted was scavenged from a regular old hard drive ribbon cable, of which I already had a ton.

Oh yeah, click on any of the pictures in this documentary to get a closer look.

Here is what it looks like while I'm wiring the extension to the display.

Looks fun, doesn't it.  It took a lot of time and patience to make the 56 solder joints needed to extend the buttons and display.

Now, let's see if it works...

    IT WORKS!!!!!!!!

Next, I moved on to the keyboard.  Taking the keyboard apart was really easy, and the LEDs were inserted in a fashion that didn't require any soldering, cutting, or anything.  Here's the results.

The results are very nice.  See how bright they are in the 2nd picture?  That's really how bright they are.  They are SO cool looking.  I was going to put some stuff in the keyboard called EL wire.  It's a wire about the thickness of the wire on a set of headphones for a walkman, and it glows blue just like the LEDs.  It would allow me to run the wire between the keys inside the keyboard to light it up from the inside.  The results would be spectacular.  Only trouble is, the controller for the EL wire needs a 12 volt input, and the power coming into the keyboard is only 5 volts.  I haven't tried it to see if it would still work or not with 5 volts.  If not, then I would have to run a separate wire from the keyboard to the PC to tap into the 12 volt sources inside the PC.  I don't think I want to do that.  I think the extra wire might look a little too tacky.  We'll see.  I might try to get some more of these LEDs and just mount a bunch of those inside to do the same job.  They only need 5 volts.  I'll worry about that in the future. 

When the case, motherboard, and processor arrived, I immediately unpacked it all, ripped the case apart, and started working.  Before it was here a couple of hours, I had already painted most of it, and started cutting the holes in the case.  Here is what the front of the case looked like when it was painted.

Above is the case with the custom blue exterior paint, and neon yellow interior to brighten it up a bit.

And here is what the inside of the side panel looks like to show how I mounted the window.

I could have bought a window kit that has nice rubber strips that are slotted on 2 sides... one side slips over the cut edge of the metal, and the window slips into the other slot so that the edges are covered for a really clean look.  Remember though, I'm on a budget and wanted to do this "on the cheap", so I just mounted it with colored electrical tape.  The clear panel is the "glass" from a 2x3 foot framed poster that I already had in the house.  It was being displayed in the basement where no one ever sees it, so I figured it wouldn't hurt if I took the glass out.  The glass is actually just a tough plastic like Lexan so it was easy to work with.

The green thing is a tube that directs cool air from the outside directly onto the processor to help cool it.  A computer processor gets pretty hot so it needs ample cooling to keep it from going into meltdown (literally).  The lighted fans I mounted in the front and back of the case pull air from inside the case and blow it out, so fresh, cool air is pulled in through this tube and other slots and vents in the case to keep the internal components nice and cool.  So far the temps inside have run just a few degrees warmer than the outside air, so the fans are doing their job wonderfully.

Now it's time to mount the motherboard, drives, etc in the case and get it ready for the first "firing".  Here's what it looked like after most of the stuff was mounted.

Notice the thick blue and red wires?  Those are rounded wires for the hard drives, CD burner, and DVD-ROM (Blue) and the floppy drive (Red).  They look nicer and don't get in the way like the flat grey ribbon cables so they help to improve airflow in the case.  Did I mention they look cool too?

It looks a little messy right now, but I'm just getting things mounted and will clean up the wires later.

You can see one of the clear, lighted fans for the back of the case in this picture.

After getting it together, I had to test the lights to see how they were going to look.  Here's a sneak preview.

    The wiring is still pretty messy right now but the lights work.  Now to get them mounted and clean things up a bit.

Here's a top view through the see thru panel in the top of the case.

The fan in the center left of the picture is the cooling fan mounted to the processor.  That little fan helped get me a 3 year warranty on the processor.

(Just a side note... the fans are cooling wonderfully.  With house air temps around 68-70, the temperature inside the case is running about 82 degrees.  The air coming off the CPU heat sink fins is about 95 degrees.  Excellent temps.  No troubles of overheating there.

Now, I don't want the lights on ALL the time, just when I'm working on the computer, so I had to have a way to turn them on and off.  I mounted a simple rocker switch on the spare floppy drive bay cover on the front of the case.  It's simple and it does the job nicely.

Nothing fancy about it, but it does exactly what I want it to do.

Here's what it looks like with the front of the case mounted.

Notice the 2 blue lights?  The left one is for hard drive activity and the right one is for power.  The stock lights were green and red.  YUCK!!

Here is the side view after all the wires have been cleaned up inside. 

The second picture is a closer look.  Looks MUCH better with the wires tied back out of the way.

Next came the job of mounting the clock.  If you look at the front view of the case about three pictures up, you'll see there are 2 unused drive bays above the CD-Burner and DVD-ROM drives.  I took the cover panel for the top bay and cut out a square for the display, then drilled 5 holes for the buttons.  The alarm clock had 8 buttons, but the other 3 controlled alarm functions, and I didn't need that so I didn't use them.  I printed a simple label that got glued to the front so I would know what each button did, and slapped it all inside.  I had to run the power cable for the clock out the back of the PC via a hole I drilled for it.  The clock is powered by itself so that even when the PC is off, the clock still works. 

It's not the most beautiful job in the world if you look at it really closely, but it works fine so I'm happy.  I can always pull it out later if I get tired of it. 

Here's the finished product. 

Originally I thought I would paint the drives and bay covers blue as well to match the case, but the way the case is inset in that area sets them apart nicely so that they look good just like they are, so I left them untouched.

Here are a couple of bonus pics.  The first one is the rear lighted fan, and the 2nd one is the front lighted fan.  The angle is not the greatest to see the full effect of the lighting, but you get the idea.

Now here's a funny story about something that happened while I was building this.  I had gotten the motherboard and processor mounted, installed the hard drive, floppy, CD, and DVD and decided it was a good time to crank her up and see if it worked.  I plugged in the power, flipped the switch, and nothing happened.  My jaw dropped.  I thought I must have something wrong so I checked the connections again and still nothing.  I disconnected everything except the motherboard, and nothing.  Maybe the switch on the case is bad I thought, so I tried a different switch.  Still nothing.  By now, I'm beginning to feel a few beads of sweat forming.  Maybe the power supply is bad, I thought, so I took one out of another PC and tried it.  STILL NOTHING.  Now, I'm beginning to freak out and the sweat is rolling down in rivers.  What did I do to screw up my brand new motherboard... or is it the processor that's faulty?  All kinds of things were running through my head.  Well, like a good tech, I started from scratch and checked all the jumper and board settings.  Sure enough I found a problem.  There is a single jumper that is set one way for normal operation, and one way to clear the CMOS.  That clears everything so that it forgets what's installed.... not normally used unless you set a password for getting into the configuration and forget it and need to clear it out.  Anyway, I set that to normal and tried it again and it worked just fine.  I wiped the sweat away, took a deep breath, and started configuring it.

From beginning to end, this all occurred in only about 3 days.  By the end of the 3rd day I had it assembled, all the software loaded, and everything moved from the old PC to the new PC.  Not bad at all.  I've listed some of the specs along the way, but here's the full set of specs with all the missing parts.

Processor - AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Motherboard - ECS K7VMM with 4x AGP slot and 2 PCI slots
Video - on board S3 Savage8 using 64 megs of shared RAM (selectable in BIOS)
Sound - on board VIA 2 channel sound (all I need really and it does a good job)
Network - on-board 10/100 ethernet
RAM - 512 megs of PC133 SDRAM
Hard Drive - 30 gig Maxtor ATA133 7200 RPM
CD - 24X Digital Research CD-RW
DVD - 4x Sony DVD-ROM
USB - USB 2.0 - 2 rear ports, 2 front, 2 unused on motherboard in case I need them.

Total cost was $332.53, but some of that includes the cost of tape, wire ties, etc that I hardly used any of.

So far, I'm very pleased with it.  It's fast, and it works great.  The sound quality is the same as the Sound Blaster AWE64 that I had in the old PC, and it looks good too.  NOTE:  For optimal video performance, load the drivers from the included CD.  The ones included with XP worked, but the video was MUCH slower than with the included drivers that are optimized for that video chipset.  The CD even came with Linux drivers for sound, video, and network.

Next, I plan on building a custom PC for my wife to replace hers. Stay tuned... I have something extra special in mind for hers.

UPDATE 2-12-03:  I managed to find a 5 volt inverter for the EL wire, so I will be customizing my keyboard to glow from inside after all.  The inverter is ordered and on the way.  I'll post the pics as I install it and finish it.

Here are the pics of the keyboard mod.  the first thing I had to do was connect the power leads for the inverter to the circuit board in the keyboard for my 5V power source.  Then I had to start winding the EL wire through the keys.  I held in in place by gluing it with a hot glue gun.

This is what it looked like after I got the EL wire all glued into place.  It took a bit of work to loop it through all the keys properly so that the keys would function properly afterward.

And this is the finished product.  Pretty sweet, isn't it?

The only thing I'm not too crazy about is the inverter has a shrill, high pitched whine to it that is rather annoying.  It's not very loud, but like I said, it is rather annoying.  I have room under the center of the keyboard on the outside to mount it so I might relocate it to the outside and try wrapping it in something to try to reduce the effects of the whine a little bit. 

Oh, total cost with the inverter purchase is now $342.53.  Still an excellent price for such an awesome looking PC.