Project : Little Stealth II

Front mounted USB Ports

Asus ships an expansion plate (for lack of a better name) with 2 extra USB ports on it that normally goes into one of the slots in the back of  the case. This is nice, most people can live with 4 USB ports and not need a  hub. But you still have to crawl under the system to plug things in, which is a  total pain. Now Compaq and other OEM's have USB ports on the front of the case, this is an awesome idea, and really needs to become part of the ATX standard so  that the rest of us can do that. But for now, The first thing I did was pull out  one of my 3.5" blank covers. I compared the size of the circuit board the 2 USB ports were on to the 3.5" cover, excellent fit. To make things easier, I decided  to use the metal of the expansion slot cover, so that I'd have a simple way to  hold the PCB to the cover. I cut the top and the bottom off the metal plate to  get it down under 3.5". I then removed the PCB from the plate, and set the plate  onto the 3.5" bay cover, and marked out the 2 holes with a marker. Then I used a utility knife to cut out the holes for the USB devices to plug in through. Not the cleanest cut, but definitely better than many I've seen. I then liberally  applied epoxy to the 3.5" bay cover, and placed the metal plate onto it, and  then added a bit more so that the plate would be well secured.

After the epoxy cured, I re-attached the PCB to the metal plate, and I had my front mounted USB ports. Unfortunately, I still had one more  problem. The cable Asus provided wasn't long enough. Although it could reach, it  could only do it via a straight line, not exactly a nice looking way to run the cable. So I grabbed my box of IDE and SCSi cables, and started comparing. I found one that was a good 4" longer, and took it over and clamped it in a vice.  I counted the number of pins I needed (10 if I remember right), and used a  hacksaw to cut off the extra 30 pinholes on the cable, at both ends, and split  the ribbon right at 10. Now the connectors on the end are not designed to be cut like that, so I reinforced them with a liberal coating of epoxy.

Big Momma

The Bigass Big Momma Radiator - Dew Can Optional.

 The Big Momma measures  6"x7"x2". The space I had to work with was EXACTLY 6"x7", and I after installing  an elbow in the output of the pump, I had about 3" between the top of the fan  and the bottom of the pump. Well I wanted to mount the radiator opposite of the way it fit, I wanted to mount the radiator at 6x7 in the space of 7x6.. So I had to do some cutting to make it fit properly. What I did was cut an opening in the metal of the front of the case, so that part of the radiator is tucked inside the plastic faceplate of the case (gotta use that blank space for SOMETHING, right?). I then tore the system down, and cut the opening in the front of the  case, I wasn't going for exact measurements, as you can see from the picture.  The hole ended up being much larger than I needed. I also managed to preserve  the case's structural integrity. After getting the hole cut, I put the fan back into the case, and started lining up the radiator, to see exactly how it turned  out, and where would be best to mount the radiator.

The other thing I wanted to do was hold the radiator up off of the fan. There are alot of reasons for doing that. First of all, at the center  hub of the fan, no air flows through that area, that's a good 50mm of the radiator that's not getting any airflow at all if you have the fan bolted up directly to it. I also had the obvious fact that a 120mm fan is about 40mm  smaller on all sides than the 6" radiator (Hey look, I pulled a NASA, and used  metric and American in the same sentence). I spent a day or two thinking about  how I was going to hold the radiator above the fan, then I noticed some old nylon screws in my junkbox, left over from my old peltier/athlon classic attempt. Perfect! They are about 1" long, 8-32 threads,and I still had 4 nylon nuts for them. If I put the nut on them, they could sit on  the screw-holes on the fan, and hold the radiator up with their heads. That was perfect, so I did a test fitting to see just how much I could comfortably have  them stick up. Turned out 7/8" was about perfect, so I twisted the nuts on all  of them up about 1/8", grabbed some epoxy, and epoxied them into the 4 holes in the fan. After they had completely dried, I did some test fitting of the radiator, finding the optimal orientation, and making my final decision on where to put the radiator in relation to the motherboard, and the hole I had made. I noted where the heads of the screws were in relation to the fins on the  radiator, and then pulled the fan back out of the case. I laid the radiator down, and carefully placed the fan down on it, making sure the heads of the  nylon screws were where I had noted. Then I mixed up a large batch of epoxy, and  coated the heads of the screws very well. This is where the 5 minute epoxy came  in very handy, as I was finishing the last bolt head, I noticed that most of the epoxy I had put on the first bolt had oozed down inside of the radiator. This was not good, so I grabbed the radiator and fan, carefully holding them tight to each other, and flipped it over. The epoxy oozed back out slowly and hardened  flawlessly. An hour or two later I was able to pick up the radiator with the  fan, more than strong enough for my needs.

Now I had the first part of my goals down, I had the radiator  held securely over the fan. Now I needed to work on ducting between the fan and  radiator, I needed to go from 120mm to 6" in a 7/8" space, and to top it off, the fan was not centered on the radiator, so each side of the duct would be  different. I cut up an old motherboard box, and made 4 trapezoids - 120mm at the top, 6" at the bottom. Unfortunately, they all turned out to be wrong because  the fan wasn't centered, but a little work with the scissors got them all lined up. The hard part was getting them to stay in place while I taped them. I used packing tape to attach them and to seal them so that air would be forced through  the radiator. Turned out rather nice.

How does she perform? Well, my old 2CoolComputer waterblock that was performing no better than a FOP32 on my old Duron, turns out that had alot to do with the 4x4 radiator I had. The 2Cool block on my TBird 750 at  1.1GHz/2.4v (101watts of heat) did excellent, it easily pulled as much heat as the CPU could give it and cooled it. Big momma wasn't even warm to the touch. I didn't have a core temp probe at the time, but the socket probe on my A7V (which reads about 10f high from what I've seen with the core temp probe) said the temp was 118f, awesome considering the radiator is small enough to fit into a mini-tower case. With the old 4x4 radiator, the block and the radiator itself  would get warm to the touch, and that was just a Duron at 1000/2.3v, barely 70watts of heat.