Adventures in Case Modding #2

From about 2001... As you no doubt recall from Part 1, I recently took a Dremel to my case. Over the weekend, while I had my brother to help, I upped the ante a bit.

On the rear panel, you'll see the new 120mm fan above the power supply. There was originally an 80mm mounting spot here. I cut off the grill back in Part 1, and you can hop back to that page if you want to see "before" pics. Last weekend, I opened it up to hold a 120mm fan. This involved some metal snips, a Dremel, and a lot of work. The 120 mm fan grill, and the fan for that matter, were donated by a Card Cooler XT I wasn't using anymore.

By the way, apologies for the picture quality. The flash on my digital camera washes things out, so to get close enough to get these shots, I had to shoot without it. I need to tape some paper over it to muffle it again.

While I'm rambling just to fill up whitespace, let's have a word about safety. Any time you're working with metal, you need to wear safety glasses. I discovered this weekend that when working with a Dremel, you need to wear a respirator mask as well. I sucked all sorts of metal shavings up my sinuses. On a related note, any time you're doing any case cutting, be sure to unbolt and remove everything from the case that you can remove. A few metal shavings in a harddrive, motherboard socket, card, or power supply, and sparks will fly.

To the right, the front bezel straight from the machine. I'd not done anything to this component yet, as it is the most noticeable. Everything else was covered up and/or stuck in the back, not easy to notice. I still have vague plans of keeping the case in a condition that would make reselling easy. But I figured it was time to bite the bullet and start cutting holes in it. With the bezel on, the front 120mm fan wasn't sucking a whole lot of air, and the front 80mm fans were barely moving air at all. Time for some surgery!

Since this mod was actually meant to be see, I decided that I should at least try to make it look good. I placed a 120mm fan grill on the bezel in various positions to see how it would look. I decided to place it as shown here, pretty much as low on the bezel as it would fit. This lines up more or less with the front 120mm fan. It doesn't have to line up exactly because of the gap between the bezel and front panel leaves room for air to flow. I think there's enough space to allow airflow for the two 80mm fans mounted a little higher on the panel. Worse comes to worse, I can always add another hole or two higher up on the bezel for more airflow.

Well, it looks nice enough, but does it perform any real function? I mean, the whole point of all this case modding was to get better air flow. And better air flow I got. Asus PC Probe shows 20F drops in both motherboard and CPU temperatures, compared to the unmodded case with a few extra case fans thrown in. And that's running the 120mm fans at 7V, so as to make less noise. All the 80mm fans are currently running at 12V. I might throttle some of them back when the weather turns cooler again.

All in all, I think it was a successful experiment. Still got a little more to do, I think. I need to cut out some holes for the two 80mm fans mounted inside the harddrive cage, and I might add a second blowhole to the front bezel to supply them with fresh air. And I still want to replace the fan in the power supply so it will quiet down a bit. But those are subjects of future articles.