Water Cooling Project - Modifying the Case (Continued): page 4
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Manufacturer: | N/A |
| Product: | Various |
Price: | Varies |
Availability: | NOW |
Reviewed By: | Jim "Justi" Miller |
Review Date: | August 2003 |
Step by Step Water Cooling Project
Modifying the Case (Continued):
Cutting Out the Relay Power Plug Hole:
Ok, so we now have room for our radiator and a place to mount it with optimum air flow, the only mod left for us is to make the hole to mount our relay power adapter. You need to take a good survey of the case to determine the best location. On this case we decided that there was room directly below the power supply. This location also offered us a spot to mount the relay itself above the motherboard allowing for neat wiring. Let's take a look at where we decided to make the hole.
As you can see above, there is a sticker right below the PSU that is about the size of the opening we need. Laying our motherboard inside the case (done before the cutting began) we notice that even with the large sized IS7 motherboard there's plenty of room above it to mount our relay. Now we were left with the cutting. We removed the metal mounting bracket and laid it on the case for a template.
With our template drawn we simply cut out the hole with our dremel and grinded the edges to avoid the lethally sharp edges..
And don't forget to grind the edges!!!
And there ya have it, the perfect mounting hole for our power adapter.
That's it, these are the only modifications we needed to make to our Enermax case to get it ready for our water cooling system.
Putting it All Together:
The very next thing you need to do is clean the case thoroughly! What I did was take a high pressure water hose and go over the entire case outside. Make certain to get EVERY bit of the case clean and free of all of the metal dust that by now is everywhere in this case! Let it air dry thoroughly when you're done. You can wipe it down with a towel but there's no where you'll get everything dry in all of the crevices, so air drying is the best. You certainly don't want to put a system in a wet case!
Mounting the Radiator/Fan:
Assuming that you now have a perfectly clean, perfectly dry case, it's time to put our system together. We'll start by mounting the radiator/fan unit in the case. It depends on who you talk to whether you want to push or pull air thru the radiator, for this project we decided to push air thru it from the front.
Our mounting logic worked out well. There was plenty of room above and below the radiator to promote good air flow, and we had plenty of room to mount the radiator solidly to the case. We decided to have the water lines mounted on the top because it lined up best with our pump in the grand scheme of things, but you'll see that later when we're close to done.
Mounting the Relay System:
The next item on our list of things to do was to mount the relay system. This entailed mounting our power plug adapter and the relay unit itself.
I was more than pleased with how the plug adapter worked out, it's impossible to tell by looking at this that we added the plug in a mod, it definitely looks stock.
Now we had to mount the guts of the relay unit and route or wiring..
Yup, no doubt, this is working out nicely so far. Now that we've got all of our "add on hardware" mounted, it's time to start the system assembly and get this thing primed...
Next: Assembling the System: page 5 >>
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