Ok, so today marks the day this case really belongs in the modding forum
I had the time to mod my case properly to sort out cable management once and for all
For this task I decided I needed a Dremel... So went out and bought one...
Always wear your safety goggles kids! They will save your peepers!
So, the plan of attack for this mod is to make the cables as discreet as possible as they can be in an original P180. I'd have loved to have all of the pre-cut holes and room for cables to be hidden behind the mobo and case door (ala updated P180/P182), but my P180 doesn't have any of that.
There is barely any room to fit a cable behind the tray and door, so the number and thickness of the cables I can hide behind it are limited even with modding the case.
But undeterred I thought long and hard about how to hide my cables. And I decided that I could route most of them round the back of the bottom chamber and up where the floppy drive bay thing finishes, then they could be cleanly routed up the side of the motherboard.
Here are all the cuts that I planed to make:
While I was at it, I decided to cut off the front 'mesh' to reduce the restrictions on the fans at the front of the case that little bit (it all adds up
)
And many hours, broken/worn down Dremel wheels later:
The picture of the random hole is to route my 8pin EPS connector up the back of the tray, so it can be hidden from view entirely, even just this one cable is really too thick for the gap there, but it squishes in (even if the case door bends slightly) so I did it anyway.
I have decided that cutting smooth corners with a Dremel is harder than I anticipated, and was probably the reason why I abused and got through wheels so quick.
Anyways, I did all of those cuts yesterday, and filed the edges all nice and smooth and had a test of fitting components in, and found that the holes weren't big enough, and that I'd forgotten to cut a bit between the top and bottom 'chamber' to let the 8pin EPS through.
Oh well, I've got plenty of time off work with the long bank holiday weekend to fix it, so I wasn't too annoyed. Better too little off, than too much. So I marked bigger holes on all of the cuts and tried again today. While I was at it, I decided that I would go crazy and add a hole in the back of the motherboard tray which would allow me access to the CPU socket mouting holes, handy for adding and removing the watercooling bracket/cpu backplates without having to take off the whole mobo (Thanks Bio for subconsciously planting that idea in my head!).
Sorry I don't have any pics of what I did today, we had snow showers this afternoon, so I wanted to get it all done as quick as possible before they hit. Besides, they'd more or less just be repeats of all the pics of yesterday, and you can see the final work at the end of this post.
Before you take a look at the finished pics, have a gander at the rig before all the modding took place:
Finished Pics(!):
I don't know whether I said before now, but I swapped all of my Antec fans for Noctua NF-P12's. Besides full speed, I can set two options: more air at the same noise level; or the same air while running quieter. Good compromise I think.
And as to the reason that my watercooling hasn't been put back in yet, is I'm waiting on a contact to get me a couple of sunbeam SLF-12-B LED 120mm fans for my radiator (he knows someone in the company) as I can't find them for sale anywhere, and their rated specs are the best I've seen for quiet LED fans (they look suitable for use on a radiator to boot). So the downtime gives me chance to clean it out and make sure it's all running as it should be when it goes back in.
For the mean time, I have the Noctua NH-U12 on, and that is keeping the CPU pretty cool while being reasonably quiet to boot (with the fans on full speed).
So if my P180 was sexy before, It's drop dead gorgeous now ^_^
Comment away plz!
Dan