How the CoolerMaster CM HAF 932? - Page 4

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GEEZ! Cold front moved in. It was 52F in Phoenix this morning. Daytime high is only expected to reach 75 degrees. It might be too cool to spray paint on the patio this evening. Don't know if I will be able to paint or not this evening. It's frustrating.

Guess its too late now Johnny but the switches are a lot cheaper at Mountain Mods.

Got home early enough yesterday and outdoor temps were good enough for spray painting. Managed to give the top front panel two coats of copper paint - very very smooth results. Two light coats are better than one heavy coat and helps to avoid runs.

My bad, Johnny

When do you plan on posting pictures Johnny? I look forward to seeing how this project is going to look.

Close call today. The wind picked up, the clouds rolled in, and thunder could be heard in the distance. Despite the threat of rain I managed to finish the power switch panel - two coats of primer, two coats of copper, and two coats of crystal clear laquer. The panel and switches are already installed. That will probably be the end of modifications to the case.

Most excellent Veteran's Day today. Traffic was not as heavy on the freeway. I should be able to get home quickly from work on the acrylic window for the side panel.

Heatsinks - Last night I was doing a little preperation prior to installing the motherboard. I was checking the alignment of the Enxotech forged copper northbridge and southbridge heatsinks. Discovered the mounting holes were just a little bit off. I'll have to do a little bit of drilling when I get home tonight. Should be fairly easy to do.

With a little luck I'll have the new heatsinks installed this evening. I looked at the case this morning and thought I would have been better off with just a single flat top panel with blowholes and power switches. It would noit be that difficult to drill out the rivets for the top panel, remove it, and replace it with a custom panel. Might look better. I'll have to think about it.

IT'S ALIVE!!!

I went ahead and installed the cpu heatsink & fans, the northbridge heatsink, the southbridge heatsink, and the moffset heatsink. For thermal compound I used 7 Carat Diamond. I secured the chipset and moffset heatsinks with #40-4 nylon bolts, washers, and nuts.

Next I connected all fans, the optical drive, one hard drive RAM, and video card. Finally I plugged in power cords and turned the system on. It worked!

Decided to go ahead and format the new hard drives and install the OS. I used NLite to slipstream a streamlined version of Windows XP Pro with SP3. It's a slick program. You can pick which Windows features you want or don't want. You can make a lot of selections in advance. You can also include extra items like your video card drivers and useful utilities. Just pop the cd-rom into the optical drive and everything is set up automatically. You can walk away and do something else. Very Cool!

Cable management didn't go to well yesterday evening. I have a ton of extra cables and stuff in a spare parts box. I must have spent a half hour just sorting out the cables on the kitchen counter to figure out what I had.

Power, Reset, and CMOS/Reset Switch cables were easy. Just routed them behind the motherboard tray. Excess cable length can be hidden behind the tray. I made some progress with the fan cables. I have two cpu fans that I wanted to connect to the motherboard and six fans that I wanted to connect to the psu. That's when the frustration set in. I used three short Y splitter fan cables on the six fans. That got the six fans down to three connections and all three met in the same spot behind the mobo tray. Then things got really frustrating. Despite a rather large collection of cables I didn't have any simple cable to connect the fans to the psu. Most of the extra cables that ship with fans come with a male molex, a female molex, a male fan connection, and a female fan connections. If I used them, then I would wind up with six molex connectors and six fan connectors behind the motherboard tray. Somewhere, at some online vendor I saw a custom cable that was made to daisy chain up to four fans to just one molex connector. It looked good in the photos. I'm going to have to see if I can get one.

Don't know how much I'll get done today due to televised NFL football games.

I figured out the problem with cable management when I went back to the CoolerMaster web site and took another look at the photo gallery. The only thing CM shows is a large power cable running up the back of the motherboard tray. There are no other cables in the photos. No SATA power cables, no SATA data cables, no front i/o cables - nothing, zip, zero, zilch! The cheeky bastards!!

Ventilation and cooling - The Asus motherboard came with a cd containing several utilities. One of the is called ASUS Probe 2. It monitors temperatures and fan speeds. At idle the utility indicated a cpu temperature of 30 degrees Centigrade. Last night I ran the Prime95 torture test. The cpu temperature hit a maximum of 40 degrees Centigrade. I have read reports and comments indicating the Asus utility might be inaccurate. I'll have to try a few test with other temperature monitoring software.

I know there's one more multi fan cable connector that is different from the Zalman version but I can't seem to find it. I know I saw it at one of the case mod vendors. Just can't remember where.

Went searching for a variety of test utilities. Discovered a thread at THG where a poster provided the following list:

3DMarkVantage - System Benchmarking / Stress Testing (Vista)
3DMark06 - System Benchmarking / Stress Testing (XP)
RivaTuner - GPU Tweaking / Overclocking
ATI Tool - GPU Stress Testing / Max Clock Finder (Mainly Overclocking)
RTHRDBL - GPU Stress Testing / Benchmarking
GPU-Z - Displaying General GPU Info, Clocks, Temps
CPU-Z - Displaying General CPU Info, Clocks, Motheboard/BIOS Versions, RAM &
Timings
Passmark Burnhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burn In Test- Can test alot of
different facets of each component. CPU, Motherboard, RAM, Etc.
Sandra XII - Mainly Hardware Data / Benchmarking
Everest - Mainly Hardware Data
CoreTemp - CPU Core Temperatures on Core 2 Duo's
MemTest - Simple RAM Testing
Prime95 - Generic Stress Testing
SuperPI - Generic Stress Testing / Benchmarking
OCCT - Generic Stress Testing
Orthos - Generic Stress Testing
wPrime - Generic Stress Testing / Benchmarking

Well, decided on a 4850 card:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6814161244

Just waiting from the price to come down. Maybe there'll be a good deal on Black Friday.

Looks like everything is running very smoothly. Temps are very stable. No glitches or problems. Happy Camper Time!

DOA - I moved my pc to a new apartment yesterday. I was very careful not to bump it. I used bath towels for padding and drove carefully. When I got to the partment I hooked up the pc. It was dead. The psu, fans, drives, card reader, and power buttons on the motherboard are all getting power but the pc will not boot. I tried every technique I've ever read about and still nothing. I have a spare cpu that I'm going to try. SIGH!

I needed to get a 6 foot long, USB 2.0, A/B external cable for one of my girlfriends. The local Best Buy, Office Max, and Radio Shack wanted between $27.00 and $32.00 for one. I knew the price was too high. When I got home I check pricegrabber.com. Best Byte Computers had the Belkin Pro cable for $1.10. I purchased three cables. The total cost including first class mail was $8.10.

Waiting to see the special sale prices tomorrow. Several online vendors have already sent out email ads.

GEE! Very slow Internet access today. Don't know what's happening. I wound up experiencing a couple of time outs.

I'm going to give the pc one more shot after work today to try and verify that the motherboard is bad. I keep hoping it's the cpu as I have a spare.

Installed the new motherboard last night. Didn't take much to get up and running. Just had to load a couple of drivers. Now I can work on finishing the case mod.

Sitting here looking at the micro atx board in the huge case. Just realised if the psu was mounted in the top, then everything below the motherboard could be chopped off. Hmmmm......

Looks like another problem with the el cheapo motherboard. There are only two SATA headers on the board. I have two SATA II hard drives and a Plextor SATA II optical drive. Had to start with the optical drive connected to load a few drivers. Then had to disconnect it and connect the second hard drive. Pain in the butt.

You can use an electric drill with a very small drill bit to drill out the rivets. Just drill into the side of the rivet with the tiny hole/depression in it. You can use a small hand operated riveter available at hardware stores and hobby shops to rivet parts back together. Your other options is to use small nuts, bolts, and washers. My situation was different. I only removed the lower hard drive cage. To spray paint the interior flat black it wasn't necessary to take the entire case apart.

I did not put the lower drive cage back in as I didn't need it. There were more than enough drive bays in the upper cage for a multi-card reader, an optical drive, and two hard drives. I used a Coolermaster 4-in3 drive bay device with 120mm fan in front for the two hard drives. You could actually mount 4 hard drives in the 4-in-3 which only takes up 3 drive bays. I have one drive bay left over in case I want to add another optical drive.

bohmann took his case completely apart as he is going to chrome plate it. Haven't heard from him in a while so I don't know what kind of progress he made.

olddman left his case alone. He is up and running with an overclocked Intel Q6600 cpu. His temperatures are very respectable for a stock case and stock fans.