|
As I mentioned in my description of my first PC-building experience in January 2001, I'd originally wanted a clear plastic Nikao Submarine case for my son's PC, but they'd been unavailable so I got a generic case from CompUSA. In December 2001 I found out that the Submarine was indeed available, which inspired me to upgrade my PCs. I got the Submarine for an amazing price at everythingconnected.com. These are shots from the Nikao website of what it looks like unmodified:    This case isn't particularly cool, temperature-wise, coming with but a single no-name fan at the bottom. The rig going inside was going to be somewhat overclocked, so I decided to plant a large fan smack-dab in the center of the right side, blowing onto the motherboard. Since everything is transparent, and this is the main window of the case I'd be cutting into (the other side has the motherboard mounted on it, which alas is not transparent), I got a 120mm Enermax clear fan with fuschia frame. I got a Dremel for Xmas, so I was ready for this! Dremelling the big hole was relatively easy (one glitch, alas, as you can see below...), and the brass outer grill nicely complements the gold-colored plastic highlights elsewhere on the case. I also got an 80mm version of the same fan to replace the cheap ugly black one that came on the bottom of the case. Now that I had enough air going into the case, I needed to get some out. I didn't want to put any holes in the top. (This PC is for my 13 year old son's use, and there is just no way that he could be deterred from piling stuff on top of the case....) The design of the case only gave me enough width at the back for a 60mm fan, so I got two excellent Thermaltake fans designed for CPU cooling (they're not as gonzo as Deltas, but they're much less noisy, and more powerful than most anything else), Dremmelled some holes as high up as possible, and installed them. (See pics below!) At first I only planned on putting grills on the outside of the fans, but when I was messing with something inside I inadvertantly touched a finger to one of the 60mm fans, which cleanly sheared off enough skin to require bandaging and cleaning blood off the inside of the case ... so I bought enough grills to protect all of the fans inside and out. I mounted all of the fans with brass nuts and bolts, so they'd look pretty. A clear plastic case demands internal lighting, so I bought a blue cold cathode light kit. Installation was easy, just using cable ties to hold the light along the top center of the case, and Dremelling a hole at the rear for the switch:   It looked pretty cool with just this light on top:   But with a case that is entirely clear/translucent plastic, just having that light at the top was not enough. So, I got a Blue "Lazer" LED thingy from Crazy PC, which has bright blue lights shining in three directions (they are also cool temperature-wise). To get it to shine upwards at an angle, I mounted it on a little Lego doohicky that I made:  The main guts of the PC (ABIT KT7, Athlon Thunderbird 1GHz @ 1.2GHz, 2 40GB Matrox HDs, SoundBlaster Live!, generic 300W power supply, DVD, & floppy) were transferred from my 3DCool case (see here), in which I was building a slight upgrade. However, I wanted long cables so the PC would run with the Sub case's door fully open, and I realized that under the blue light any colored round cables would look funky, so I got 36" silver mesh IDE cables for the HDs and DVD, and a 24" single-device silver mesh rounded floppy cable. So, here's how it turned out:            |