Home | Forums | Article Search | Subscribe & Shop | Contact Us | Log Out Mad Reader Mod Email This Print This View My Personal Library Hard Hat Area October 2008 • Vol.8 Issue 10 Page(s) 38-39 in print issue Add To My Personal Library Mad Reader Mod WCCC_9,000 A successful mod strikes the perfect balance between form and function, and it’s plain to see that Justin Diduch’s WCCC_9,000, named for Justin’s Seattle-based West Coast Custom Computers shop, is cover-of-Forbes material when it comes to a job well done. For the WCCC_9,000, Justin took an Antec 900 case and sliced off the case’s 200mm fan-equipped top panel and replaced it with a beveled piece of quarter-inch thick smoked acrylic. Justin mounted a 2 x 120mm radiator to the acrylic panel and then bolted a 200mm Koolance reservoir to the top of the radiator. The pair of 120mm fans sport blue LEDs and reside inside the case on the underside of the acrylic panel to push air through the radiator. Justin installed a second 2 x 120mm radiator vertically, behind the 5.25-inch drive bays and aluminum modder’s mesh front grille. Justin liberated the 5-inch LCD from the headrest of a wrecked Acura Legend, which he found rotting in a Seattle-area junkyard. Justin created the mounting bracket for the LCD out of a pair of Lian-Li 5.25-inch bay covers and another piece of acrylic. Justin designed and configured a custom frontend using the system monitoring software Serious Samurize (www.samurize.com) to display CPU and GPU clockspeeds, core temperatures, remaining HDD space on the WCCC_9,000’s dual 500GB Seagate SATA II HDDs, and system voltages. The front end is polling data once a second from SpeedFan (www.almico.com), RivaTuner (www.guru3d.com), and a couple of WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) monitors. Justin cut the Antec 900’s dual pane side panel so that it has a single large window and then covered it with another slab of acrylic. The side panel fan is a 220mm Koolance fan equipped with blue LEDs. The right side panel currently features a Crysis vinyl wrap, but Justin said it may feature a screenshot from Far Cry 2 very soon. Justin used the Asus P5N-D SLI as his machine’s foundation and installed an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 into the WCCC_9,000, overclocking it to an impressive 4GHz. The system features 4GB Patriot Viper DDR2 1,066MHz memory, an XFX 9600GT with the core, shaders, and memory clocked at 800, 1,800, and 2,000MHz, respectively. A Thermaltake 750W Toughpower PSU powers the system. Justin used several Koolance waterblocks in the system, including a GPU-200, CPU-340, and three CHC-125s to cool the Asus P5N-D SLI’s northbridge and southbridge chips. The most difficult part of the mod was cable management. All told, Justin estimates that he spent about 60 hours on the WCCC_9,000, and it really shows. View the graphics that accompany this article. (NOTE: These pages are PDF (Portable Document Format) files. You will need Adobe Acrobat to view these pages. Download Adobe Acrobat Reader) Give Us Your Mod Have a computer mod that will bring tears to our eyes? Email photos and a description to madreadermod@cpumag.com. We’re looking for rigs that are recognizable as PCs; your Wookiee mod won’t find a home here. If we include your system in our “Mad Reader Mod” section, we’ll help you load up your modder’s toolbox with $1,500 and a one-year subscription to CPU. Want more information about a topic you found of interest while reading this article? Type a word or phrase that identifies the topic and click "Search" to find relevant articles from within our editorial database. Enter A Subject (key words or a phrase): ALL Words (‘digital’ AND ‘photography’) ANY Words (‘digital’ OR ‘photography’) Exact Match ('digital photography'- all words MUST appear together) Home      Copyright & Legal Information      Privacy Policy      Site Map      Contact Us Copyright © 2010 Sandhills Publishing Company U.S.A. All rights reserved.